


Britannia et Panem

by just_a_dram



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Rome, Alternate Universe - Historical, Ancient Rome, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Celts, Cultural Differences, F/M, Rebellion, Roman Britain, Sexual Tension, Tumblr: promptsinpanem, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-15 17:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 39,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Romans conquered their land, Katell never thought it would be a Roman who saved her.  She returned the favor by almost killing him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Pairing** : Katniss/Peeta  
>  **Chapter Rating** : T  
>  **Summary** : When the Romans conquered their land, Katell never thought it would be a Roman who saved her. She returned the favor by almost killing him.  
>  **Author's Note** : Originally written for day three of the Prompts in Panem AU event, where the prompt asked you to write about Everlark during war. [Original posting](http://promptsinpanem.tumblr.com/post/32824505124/britannia-et-panem). This will end up a multi-chapter fic.

 

 

 

**Britannia et Panem**

His companion is dead before Gael ever leaps the ditch as quick as a red deer.  He’s speared through the throat, his eyes gaping open unseeing into the grey sky, but the other one is badly injured yet still alive.  He fights.  He struggles mightily against Gael, almost managing to throw him on his back.  He’s strong enough that uninjured Gael might not stand a chance.  But we’ve performed our task too well, crippled him just enough.  There are things the Romans have that we don’t that make our struggles feel hopeless, but we’re skilled in guerilla tactics that these Romans are never quite prepared for, and Gael gains the upper hand.

“He’s good with a knife,” Gael calls, flashing a bleeding forearm, just a scratch, as he pulls the fallen Roman we’ve speared through the thigh over the ditch, where Jowanet crouches with her iron axe and I with my spear.

Gael could cut him there on the road, but he might mean to take the man’s head as a trophy.  Gael pulls the man’s head back by the hair, and he stops kicking, because any movement would only help Gael finish the job.

I see the man’s face, his teeth clenched in pain or fury, and my first thought is to scorn the gods.

 _Not him_.

I would know him anywhere.  He saved me once.

…

Before they started building the stone and turf wall the Romans call the Antonine Wall, we thought we were safe.  After three generations of my people had lived through Roman invasion, war, and conquest, the Romans no longer troubled us.  We were north of Hadrian’s Wall, constructed in response to a failed rebellious uprising, and after the stone wall rose, they seemed content to stay south and collect tribute from those that sought to pass through, controlling the flow of goods and people from one region to another in a show of their boundless power.  The only thing that need concern my family was the southward push of our wild northern neighbors and the drive to fill our bellies with a successful harvest.  That’s the way it had been for eons, so the Druids, keepers of our past, told us.

Safe.  That’s something only children believe in.

Romans must want to cover the world in roads and forts, for they’re never satisfied with what they have, and their gods must be lucky, for they very rarely can be stopped in getting what they want.  The invasion was quick.  Three legions of their heavily armored men moved like a millipede across the land from Coria south of the wall towards the Firth of Forth along the Roman military road, throwing up their forts to keep watch over the northern free remnant of the Brigantes and the lowlanders, the Selgovae, Damnonii, Novantae, and my people, the Votadini.

The war took my da and half the men from our hillfort settlement before two harvests were brought out of the fields.  The Druids teach us that when one dies, the spirit does not, but comes again with new birth.  Little good some squalling infant would have done my family: we needed my da.  It might as well have taken my mà as well, for she was left present only in body, not in spirit.  With a sister not old enough to throw a spear and no brothers, we were close to starving as the winter after Da’s passing ebbed.

My people were forced to accept an unequal _alliance_ with the Romans, which spares our land from being dotted with forts the way some of the more southern tribes’ lands are.  We’re a buffer between them and the people they fear more than us: the Caledonians who rush into battle smeared in woad.  The Romans use us and remain close enough that we know we are not free and aren’t like to ever be free again. 

Near the most eastern point of the wall at the terminus of the Roman road lies a stone fort and settlement with two marching camps they call Veluniate.  It’s well supplied with grain—more grain than they need and grain that I knew could save our starving family.  After my da died and we had nothing left of our winter stores, I made the two day trek to the Roman settlement.  It was not my intention to come begging.  I am proud.  Proud of my family, my settlement, and my people.  I brought cloth woven by my mà for trade, but the soldiers cared nothing for my homespun offerings, and I found myself outside their market, trembling from exhaustion and despair.  I would have to let my family die or I would have to offer something else to these Romans.

My body.  I knew other women who had done it.  When Jowanet still had a family to save, she made use of what she had for Roman food or Roman coin.  Only, I couldn’t make myself move towards any of them, couldn’t make myself unwind my furs from around my shoulders to expose the tan of my skin to their glares.

He was standing guard by a loaded wagon, watching me, as I slumped against a wood support.  He looked like all the rest—strangely smooth faced and broad of chest—but he looked back at me not with the usual scorn.  I couldn’t read what was in his eyes, but perhaps he was kinder than the rest.  Better him than the older man with the rancid breath, who had shouldered me out of the way, when I held up Mà’s handiwork.

But he didn’t take from me.  He gave.  Assigned to guard the wagon, the Roman soldier with yellow hair loaded my arms with a sack full of grain instead.

…

Gael’s hand is on the handle of his knife, his knuckles white, ready to hack the Roman’s head from his neck.  I dart forward and grab it, holding it fast, preventing him from following through.

I would scream for him to stop—a scream threatens to tear from my throat—but there are likely to be other Romans nearby, patrolling the road.  Their presence is what has drawn us here, eager to commit an act of rebellion.  Gael wants nothing to do with an alliance.  Rebellion burns in his blood, and he means to drive the Romans south or kill every last one of them

 _Not this one_.

Usually Gael understands me.  There is usually no need for words between us—a useful thing in hunting partners and resistance fighters—but I can see by the narrowing of his eyes that my restraining grip on him has lost him.  “We’ll take him with us.”

I can feel the Roman’s blue eyes on me, but I stare back at Gael, willing him not to move the knife across the man’s throat.

“For ransom?” Jowanet asks, fingering her axe at her side.  I’m thankful she’s given me a reason, because I’m terrible at lying.  I latch on to it, nodding my head.  “He’s like to die, Kat.”  She indicates his bleeding thigh with the head of her axe.  His woolen trousers are slashed open.  Where the spear sliced through him the edges are soaked in his blood.

“I’ll fix him.”  I don’t have the skill that my mà and sister have in herbs and arts, but I know enough to keep him alive.  I think.

Gael growls.  I know this isn’t what he planned, when he attacked the pair of Roman soldiers.  There’s no good reason for him to listen to me: he’s older, more seasoned, and a man, but Gael respects me.  We’ve hunted together, fought together, and he trusts me.

That doesn’t stop me from being surprised when he pulls back, tucking his knife away.  “I’m not carrying him.”

Either Gael kills him now or he dies here slowly, bleeding into the earth.  The only chance the Roman has is to stay with me until he’s some healed.  “Don’t fight me,” I say to the Roman, but it goes for Gael as well, who still eyes the Roman like he’d like to spill more foreign blood.  I push Gael away, kneeling down alongside the wounded man.  “You can walk, can’t you?” I ask, looking down into his pale face.  I don’t give him the chance to answer. 

“Tie his arms,” Gael insists.

“No.  He wouldn’t be able to walk in his condition.  I’ll watch him.”  He’s weak.  Weaker than I thought.  There’s little chance he’ll fight me or try to run.

“Make sure you do.”

I scowl back at Gael, while Jowanet smirks at the both of us.  I slip my arm under the Roman, tugging him upright.  He’s heavy with more muscle than the men in our village ever manage to build.

“What are you doing?” the Roman finally asks, as he leans into me, letting me support his weight.

“It’s all right.  I’m not going to leave you.”

…

As the night grows dark and the embers of the fire die out, I check his wound.  There’s no debris and it isn’t yet showing signs of infection.  He hisses with the pain as I tug at the wrapping, pulling it tight.  My touch isn’t as gentle as my mà’s, but that’s no surprise—I have no practice or patience in gentleness.  My skill will have to be enough.  The wound will need to be rewrapped when the sun rises in the morning, but for now it will keep.  There’s an herb I need that would help with the pain some, but I haven’t come across it yet, as we slowly make our way back from the Roman road.

His fevered eyes don’t leave mine, as I tuck and pull at his shredded trousers.  I can feel them on me no matter where I look.

“Why?”

His voice is raspy and thin with pain, but low enough that they might not have heard him.  I glance over at Gael and Jowanet’s silhouetted forms, checking to see if there are two pairs of eyes on me.  I don’t want them to hear me talking with our _prisoner_ , but they seem to be asleep.

“Here,” I say, wetting his lips with the skin I carry at my side.  “Open.”  His cracked lips part and water trickles between them.  He finishes and I drink from it as well, wiping the spilled drops off my chin with the heel of my hand, as I finish.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Taking Romans prisoner?”

“Saving me.”

I look away.  It’s a good question.  One Gael would like an answer to, no doubt.  “To pay my debt.  I remember you.  The grain.”

He exhales heavily.  “I should have given you more.  Your arms looked as thin as bird bones.”

My cheeks heat.  He remembers too.  I didn’t expect that.  Suddenly the looks he’s been giving me make more sense.  He remembers me at my lowest, weakest point, and there’s something about that I don’t like, even though I owe him my life.  I don’t like to be thought of as needy.

“It was enough.”  More than anyone else would have given a dirty little Votadini girl.  It saved me, my sister, my mà , it saved me from having to give myself to one of these conquering Romans, and it gave me hope.

I should thank him, but I’m not good with words, not even the words of my own tongue, which he knows surprisingly better than most.  There’s only a strange drag on the words when they leave his mouth, like his tongue is too thick, drunk on mead.  That might only be the effects of the fever.

“I know your settlement,” he says, as I throw his red woolen cape, which is muddied from our trek, over his legs.  It could be colder, but in his condition he’ll freeze faster than the rest of us.  “I’ve been there.”

I wrap my arms around my legs, pulling them tight to my chest.  “You’re feverish.”  Talking nonsense.  Romans come to our hillfort, because they find their way all over.  They crawl over the earth like ants, but we’re all just a sea of dark faces to them, one barbarian undistinguishable from the next.

“And you bring meat and skins to trade at market.  Sheep.  Your family has sheep.”

We didn’t always, but after he gave me the grain, I worked a trade for a pair of sheep.  We have a few now, good for wool, good for eating, and my sister tends them.  It’s made such a difference in our life, but I don’t know how he can know this without seeing it for himself.

I purse my lips.  I know he’s kind, but why has this Roman made a practice of noticing me?  “We have to eat, do something to survive.”

“You look better.  Not so thin.”  I can see him swallow beneath the undyed linen tied around his neck.  “I’ve never seen another woman like you.”

“Half my settlement looks just the same as me,” I say with a sigh.  I hope these feverish comments don’t mean that rot has already set in.  It was red, but didn’t stink.  I thought he was all right.

“You really have no idea, do you?” he asks, staring up at the starless sky, but it’s a question that clearly doesn’t need an answer, and I’m more comfortable with silence.

I listen to the sounds around me.  The pop of the last dying gasp of the fire.  The chirp of insects.  The wind in the tallest tree.

He breaks the silence at last, when I assume he’s slipped into sleep.  “I’m going to die.”  He sounds mostly resigned, only a little frightened.  It could be that his gods are as good to his people in the afterlife as they are to them in this one.  Then there wouldn’t be much to fear.

But, I don’t want him to die.  I thought I wanted all Romans dead, but he saved me.  I want to do the same for him.  Discharge my debt.

Gael will be angry with me for moons.  I know he thinks we’re taking an unnecessary chance, and normally I’d agree.  Killing Romans, not ransoming them, is his chosen method of rebellion.  It’s usually mine as well.

“I didn’t go to all this trouble to have you die,” I mutter.

“I’ll mention that to Charon,” he says with a smile.  It’s a good smile.  A little crooked over a mouthful of perfect teeth.  It’s the sort of smile that probably makes women eager to peel off his tunic.

I’m not that kind of woman.

I toe the dirt with my boot.  “Who’s Charon?”

“Someone you don’t want to meet.”

It sounds like a joke, but either he’s not as good in our tongue as I thought or the fever has muddled his mind, because he makes no sense at all.

“If I’m going to die, I’d like to know your name.”

“You’re not going to die,” I insist again, but after a long moment, where I rub my calloused hands over the shins of my trousers, I give in to his request.  “Katell.”

“They call you Kat.”

I nod.

“What does it mean?”

 _Pure_.  Jowanet teases me about that when the mood strikes her.  I’m not telling him that, so I ignore his question.

“Go ahead.  Tell me _your_ name.  Otherwise I’ll just keep thinking of you as Roman.”  I spit the last word with almost as much venom as Gael ever does.

“Well, I don’t want that.  I’m Peete, Second Augustan Legion.”

I know something of his legion.  The Second Legion built the wall that traps us inside the Roman’s empire.  We can thank Quintus Lollius Urbicus for taking our land and driving us further north.  His name and the Second Legion’s are etched upon the plaques on the wall.  The letters are nonsense to someone like Gael, but my mà taught me how to recognize the letters by drawing them in the dirt with a stick.

She’s one of them.

“Peete.”  I test the name aloud.  “Doesn’t sound Roman.”

“It’s not.”

Peete has the smooth face—though it will be stubbled by morning—and broadness of many of the Romans, but his yellow hair and blue eyes are not like the others.  He looks more like my mà.  Her people were from across the sea.  Maybe Peete’s people are too.  Gael says all Romans are the same, but he doesn’t mean my mà.  She’s one of us, she chose my da.  Maybe Peete is like my mà—not Roman by blood, but born in their sprawling empire, an empire that will one day consume the earth like a plague of locusts.  I hate the Romans as much as Gael does, I want to fight them and drive them from our lands, but they can’t all be the same.

“You’re a long way from home, Peete.  You should go back.”  I say it more softly than Gael would.

“I can’t.  There’s no home to go back to.”

His eyes shut, and he must drift off to sleep.  It’s better that way.  We shouldn’t have been talking in the first place.  I can’t afford to get attached to this strange foreigner the way my sister gets attached to wounded animals.

I’m supposed to be on watch, but I look at all the wrong things.  I find myself staring at his long pale lashes and the locks of yellow hair stuck to his forehead.  The color is natural, not the bright white of Jowanet’s, the color stripped from the lime she uses to spike it before going into battle.  I brush the sweaty hair off his brow.  It’s soft too.  Not hard like Gael’s, caked with clay and slicked back like a horse’s mane.  The Romans bathe obsessively, fouling our sacred waters in their need to constantly wash their bodies.  A bath house went up right alongside the fort at Veluniate, because they place cleanliness above almost anything else.  It’s a strange practice, but it does make their hair as soft as a babe’s.

He must think my black braided hair very unremarkable in comparison.  I pull back my hand from where it has rested on his brow and work at the leather tie that holds my braid in place.  Unknotting it, I work my fingers through the tangled gnarls, picking out any leaf debris I’ve gathered from sleeping on the ground.  I’ll just rebraid it when I’m finished, but it will be smoother, less wild looking, more like the Roman women with their long shiny hair hanging in ropes down their backs.

I finish and shift, folding my legs beneath me, and the movement makes his eyes crack open.

“You need to rest.”

“I thought you were gone,” he mumbles, the words thicker than ever.

The leather tie is plenty tight, but I fidget with it.  “I’m here.”  It would be better for him if we’d never met again, but he seems relieved.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The names are not misspelled. They are the appropriate sounding equivalents, depending on the character's place of origin and the era.
> 
> Peete was patrolling the Roman road between the Romans forts Oxton and Trimontium.
> 
> The Antonine Wall was constructed in 12 years and was begun in 142 due to pressure from the Caledonians. The wall was built of turf and stone and was 39 miles long. It was guarded by 16 forts and additional fortlets.
> 
> Animal husbandry, including the keeping of sheep, was common among the people of northern Romano-Britain.
> 
> In Roman mythology, Charon ferried newly dead souls across the river to Hades.
> 
>  For general readers, these are good books on Romano-Britain:
> 
> History of Roman Britain, Peter Salway  
> Roman Britain: A New History, Patricia Southern  
> Roman Britain: A New History, Guy de la Bedoyere
> 
> As for sites:
> 
> [RBO](http://www.roman-britain.org/overview.htm) has info about all Roman sites in Britain: forts, civilian settlements, temples, etc.  
> [Historic Scotland](http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/index/places/propertyresults/propertydetail.htm?PropID=PL_305&PropName=Antonine%20Wall:%20Overview) has info about the Antonine Wall.  
> For geography north of the wall, I’m using Ptolemy, and Ptolemy’s geography is available [here](http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/_Texts/Ptolemy/2/2*.html).


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Discharging the debt will free me of Peete and these thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who enthusiastically embraced what became the first chapter of this fic during PiP. It's my first AU for Hunger Games, and as a historian, I'm flying my geek flag on this one.

I share my portion with Peete, when we break fast the next morn, and he gives me a hunk of risen bread from his satchel the likes of which only Romans enjoy.  His freely given gift only makes me feel guilty for thinking of how we should have taken it from him yesterday, searching his person for more than just knives.  We’re efficient killers, but perhaps not the best captors.

I share with him again when we stop at nightfall, and he seems some stronger as a result, despite the exertion of the day.  I’ve replaced his wrapping once and kept the wound clean enough that I’m certain I was right: he’ll live.  He will be left with a scar that tells a story.  He’ll tell his gentle wife about the scrawny Votadini girl that saved his life, so that he could come back to her.

By daybreak on the second day he walks on his own, limping along loudly enough to announce our presence to any passing Roman.  And he chatters.  Almost endlessly.  Asking questions about me, my family, my settlement.  I don’t answer most of them.  It wouldn’t be wise to do so.  My lack of response doesn’t stop him.  And without being prompted, he talks endlessly about his life too.

He has very little to say about Veluniate or his life there, which is probably the only thing Gael wants him to open his mouth about.  He makes no mention of a wife, which seems an odd thing, unless Roman women like their men dark, where Peete is light—all yellow hair and blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, chapped from the cold.  He has plenty to say about his life before his legion was moved to this northern outpost to build the wall, however, and about his life before he was a legionary, how he wrestled at home with his brothers and fed the pigs they raised every morning when the village was just stirring.  He talks about his father’s flatbread with oil and herbs from their garden for so long and with such enthusiasm that Jowanet finally tells him to shut it or her stomach will force her to slit him from neck to groin.  Mine is rumbling too, and I’m glad she put a stop to his reminiscing.

It confuses me, makes me feel unsettled.  It sounds like the perfect life—warm summers, full bellies, family—but then why did he come here?  Why do any of these Romans come to freeze in the snow and build roads and walls?  He seems too good, too kind to be one of them, but I can’t truly wish he’d stayed home in his village across the sea, when he saved me, saved Mà, saved my baby sister, and the only way I know how to pay off that debt is to keep Gael from taking his head.

We’re deeper in our own territory now, safer, and although for Gael and Jowanet’s benefit I walk with my spear tip held out behind Peete’s back to keep him from running, Gael has stopped scowling at me every time a twig snaps underneath Peete’s heavy weight or he speaks to ask another pressing question.  Gael insisted at daybreak that we bind his arms behind his back.  I keep catching myself staring at the way the cords bite into the pale flesh at his wrist and wishing I could saw them off.

I’ve always been afraid of being weak like my mà, but now I’m acting as soft as my dangerously sentimental sister, who would rather nurse a bird with a broken wing back to health than make a meal of it.

Peete’s fever broke during the night, but he still stares at me with those big blue eyes in a way that I mistook for delirium that first night.  The way he looks at me makes my stomach clench, but not in fear.  I didn’t bind his arms when we slept.  He could have killed us all.  Instead, he helped me with the fire in the early blush of dawn and brushed his hand over mine when I burned it in my rush to get it to flame.  It clenched then too.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, as I side eyed him.  “Or your friends.”

I know this somehow.  He’s a man trained to kill, and yet, he seems much less dangerous than any of us three.  Of course, he has less to be angry about.

“Walk faster,” I demand to silence my self-doubt, giving Peete a push from behind that isn’t enough to throw him off balance even with his wound, but all he does is laugh under his breath like he knows I’m all bluff and bluster.

He makes some offhanded excuse about being unused to marching through forest.  Of course, the Romans would pave the world if they could.  Perhaps they will.  I try to remember that he’s one of them.  I do.

I might be soft in the head, but Gael hasn’t forgotten the real danger Peete poses.  He announces a change of plans just as we should be heading east for our settlement.  I’ve had a moment taking shape in my mind, as we tromp across the damp forest floor, of when I’ll introduce Peete to my family.  It’s ridiculous, because he’s a captive, but I want them to at least see him even if they’ll never know who he is to me.  No one knows of Peete’s kindness nor will they ever, but I want my sister to meet him.  Primula wouldn’t think of him as a Roman.  She’d see him as a broken thing, and she might do a better job of speeding along the healing of his wound and assure me I haven’t condemned him to an early death.

But we’re not going home, and the change is because of our Roman hostage.

“It’s not safe to take him,” Gael says, jerking his head in Peete’s direction, “back to our settlement.  The Romans would be all over us.  It’d break the peace.”

I know how little Gael thinks of the peace, so he must be concerned about more than keeping it.

“What does that mean?” I ask, as my muscles tense, ready to defend Peete, who can’t defend himself with his hands bound, in case Gael intends to separate him from his head after everything.

Gael steps forward into my space and tips my chin up with the hook of his index finger.  “What is it with you and this Roman?”

“It’s not about him.”

“Then what is it?”

“You’re being awfully secretive.  You best tell me what your plan is, because I won’t follow you blindly.”

It’s a fair enough criticism, given that he’s grown increasingly quiet ever since I insisted we take Peete with us.  We’re not equals exactly, but out here alone in the forest, Gael treats me like one of the men.  Like his partner.  Not now though.  He’s acting strange.  Saying little to me, and yet, always too close.  Hovering and watching.

His hand drops.  “Don’t get heated, Cattail.  We’ll head to Alauna.”

There’s the immediate rush of relief that Peete is not in immediate danger.  My hands unclench and I mumble something in agreement.  If we’re heading for the island dun of Alauna, I know he means to have Finn help us.  Finn’s not Votadini, he’s Damnonii.  His people live beyond the wall, trapped between the edge of the Roman sword and the screams of the Caledonians.  They fish, where we farm, pulling life from the seas to sustain their families.

We haven’t seen hide nor hair of Finn in moons, though he’s always been eager enough to aid in our rebellious efforts when we’ve sought him out in the past.  I glance over at Jowanet to see if there’s any change in her attitude, but she’s wearing her usual unimpressed by anything glower.  We’ll see if that holds when Finn’s red head and bare chest appears on the horizon.

…

Gael hunts before nightfall and all of us eat something other than hard biscuits and dried meat for the first time in days.  Gael grumbles about my sharing with Peete, but I remind him that I can do with my portion what I want.  It shuts him up.  He satisfies himself with glaring at Peete as if he is carving him up in his mind like the deer that turns on the spit before us.

“Ignore him,” I advise, nodding towards Gael.  “He’s always ill tempered.”  Like me.

“That might be, but he’s right.  You don’t have to share.”

I brush off his comment, tearing with my teeth into the perfectly roasted meat, speaking around it as I chew.  “You’re my responsibility.  Eat.”

He follows my command with a small quirk of his mouth.  Something like a silent thanks.

I take my responsibilities seriously, as seriously as Gael takes his.  We’re cut from the same cloth, as Gael’s mother likes to say.  Two of a kind.  But I can feel the divide between us tonight.

“Your man is right about something else too,” Peete says, pausing in his awkward eating, which requires bringing his bound hands together up to his lips.

“I don’t have a man.”

Peete’s eyes cut across the fire to Gael, who leans back on his elbows, while Jowanet acts brasher than usual with him, going out of her way to flirt in an almost threatening manner, her axe brushing his hip, as she leans into him.  I can’t help but suspect she’s acting this way, because we will soon see Finn.  There’s something different about Jo and Finn.  Or, something different about Jo when she’s around him.

Peete swallows and I watch the roll of his throat, covered in fine pale stubble that would scratch the pads of my fingers if I touched him.  Watching Jowanet’s forwardness seems to make him uncomfortable, but then, Romans are different than us in more than one way.

His eyes settle on the fire, when he begins, “I thought…”

He thought Gael was my man.  Gael might have given him that impression, hanging too near me and growling at Peete at every turn.  It occurs to me for the first time that Gael might have wanted to give him that impression, although I can’t work out why.

Gael is one of the few people in this world that I feel bound to: he helped my family after Da died though we are not kin.  He took me out to hunt, when I was much too young to be anything but a bother to him, helping to feed our family as well as his.  But I’m not his woman.  I’m not any man’s woman and I have no intention of ever sitting by a man’s hearth and waiting to see if he’ll come back from war or whether I’m to struggle to feed wailing wee ones on my own.

Gael’s handsome.  I can see it in the way Jowanet rakes her eyes over him and the way the village girls stick to him like flies to honey.  He’s tall and he has a good face.  He doesn’t have a family of his own, but he doesn’t make a practice of lying alone.  I, however, am never one of the women that warm his bedroll.

“You thought wrong,” I correct him.

Peete gives me that same strange look that I can’t read, but I stare boldly back at him this time and he looks down at the dark meat clutched between his fingers.  “Well, he’s right about not taking me to your hillfort.  I’m not important.  They wouldn’t pay you for the pleasure of having me back.  They would burn your village.  Enslave your family.  I don’t want that to happen to you.”

His voice is rough.  He sounds as weary as our first night together, when his wound was fresh and he was sick with fever.  There’s a sadness that weighs him down beyond the threat the Romans pose to some Votadini girl’s village, and if I was as good at reading people as I am with my sling shot, I might determine the cause.

“Is that what happened to your home?”

I don’t know why I’m asking, but I have this urge to understand him, to make him seem less foreign and justify my own imprudent actions.

“Something like that,” he mumbles, shoving another mouthful of meat between his shiny lips.

He’s foolish.  Foolish to have helped me, when it could have cost him his pay or worse, and foolish not to have run at his first chance to put this band of dirty rebels behind him.  I can tell by Gael’s fierce stare that he doesn’t know what to make of our compliant captive either.  Trustworthiness is not something we’ve learned to expect from foreigners.  But I want to believe Peete is different, that he’s more than just a fool.

The urge to trust him can’t be sane.  Maybe all his endless talking has worked on me like the water wears away at stone, rounding it, smoothing it until it’s changed its very nature to something almost soft to the touch.

If Peete leaves, I’ll save myself from these mad thoughts and discharge my debt.  I’ll be free of him.  Everything will be right again between Gael and me.

“You should run tonight,” I say, lowering my head so Jo and Gael don’t see my lips move.  “I’ll pretend to have fallen asleep on my watch, give you a good start.”

With Gael’s tracking skills, it’s unlikely Peete could escape, but Jowanet will have her heart set on seeing Finn and I might convince him to let the whole thing go as a poorly conceived idea.  I’ll promise to kill the next one.  Promise to follow the plan.

I watch Peete through my lashes, waiting for him to nod, to give some sign that he’s heard my whispers and will take me up on my offer.  Some sign that he isn’t a fool.  His eyes roam over my face and he lifts his bound hands to brush the side of my knee.  My fingers itch to dart out, to cover his big hands with my own, to grasp them tightly, but I hold back, held captive by his gaze.

“Run?  There’s nothing to run to.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn's settlement isn't large. It doesn't have a palisade to keep us or the Romans out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter Rating** : T  
>  **Author's Note** : I mentioned snuggling in a crannog on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com/). The snuggling turned into a pretty extensive venture, so it has been moved to the next chapter rather than give it short shrift here.

We reach the shoreline of the Firth of Forth.  Dragging a wooden boat from the thick ferns, where it is hidden for those who are friends of the Damnonii, we carry it over the pebbled beach and into the cold, grey water.  It laps at my legs, soaking my trousers and sending a chill up my spine.  The sun should be high in the sky, reflecting off the water, giving at least the illusion of warmth, but it is obscured by dense fog.

Gael pushes Peete a little roughly into the boat by his head, causing Peete to stumble before he finds his seat.  His cheeks heat and I realize that this man can be angered, though he seems slow to burn.  He is some recovered from his injury, better able to react to what is being done to him, and perhaps we have pushed him to the brink of what he can tolerate.

Gael is not cruel, but he is angry like I am.  Angry with the Romans and their roads and walls, angry over the death of his da and mine, angry about the winters we’ve starved, and now there is something else that makes anger boil under his skin, enflaming his blood.  It’s something he will not speak about with me, as the silence between us stretches.

“I can’t swim,” Peete says with a tight grin, as if to assure Gael that he won’t attempt a foolhardy escape once we are in open water.  I’d like to see anyone try in the chill of these waters with bound hands.  “But I’ll help row if you untie me.”

Alauna is far enough, but the fog that should have been burned off by now hangs over the water, making the island look at an even greater distance than it is.  We could use his help.  I can see how strong he is—all ropey muscles along his shoulders and arms—and his assistance would no doubt make our trip that much quicker, but even I roll my eyes at his offer, knowing what damage Peete could do, should he be given an oar to wield.  I know he could have killed us already in the night if he wanted to, but Gael doesn’t.  There is no chance Gael will concede to untying Peete under any circumstances.

“You’re funny, Roman,” Jowanet observes, proving for not the first time that she is slightly less antagonized by Peete’s presence than Gael is.

It is almost the first thing she has said since we broke camp.  She has walked with a determined purpose that defied meaningless conversation.  Jo and I don’t talk the way some women in our settlement do, but I know enough to understand her focused walk: Alauna is within reach, which means Finn is too.

There is no chatter between us on the water, for the wind is rough and makes it difficult to cut through the water with any real speed.  The sun has sunken low in the sky and night is almost upon us by the time we pull ourselves from the cold water, our bodies aching with fatigue.  Jo stretches her arms over her head, loosening the muscles in her back, even as she leads the way, marching along the rock outcroppings of the bank towards Finn’s settlement.

Alauna is a small settlement and it lacks a palisade to keep us or the Romans out.  They depend upon the security of the island, their crannogs, and the watchfulness of their people to keep them safe.

Voices from the village already carry over the wind, when Peete leans down close to my ear, an easy enough shift, since our elbows brush, as I hold tightly to my captive’s arm.  “Do you know these people?”

“Yes.”

“Will they be happy to see us?”

Most likely all but Peete, which points out the oddness of his use of the word ‘us’.  There is us and him—Votadini and Roman with an insurmountable bridge between the two.  It might be a difficulty in translation, though he continues to surprise me with his skill with my language, with his words.  But my response dies on my lips, as Jo slows her steps and lets her grey wolf fur slip from her shoulder, exposing more skin, shifting her hips with exaggerated care.  Jo has many weapons.

I look sideways at Peete: he notices it too.

I jab him in the side, but he merely grins back at me.

“Who’s the man?” he asks, lowering his voice, which is wise, since I’d hate to see her axe buried in his broad chest.

The man is Finn, and Jo’s steps have become more deliberate, because he stands just around the bend in the shoreline at the edge of the village that is made up of causeways leading out into the water, round crannogs, and a round house of stone further up the sloping hill with grazing pasture beyond.  He stands feet astride before a fire just beyond a causeway that leads to the last crannog of the settlement with his hands at his hips.  His back is turned, but he’s still a noteworthy specimen of masculinity.  Even from this distance I can see the flexed muscles in his back, the banded tattoos on his arms, and his clayed red hair.

“Finn,” I say with a nod of my head, indicating the man before us.

It occurs to me as Finn hears our footfalls and turns, a slow smile quirking his lips, that Finn doesn’t have his own dwelling or he didn’t the last time I was in this settlement.  He lived with Magaidh, an older woman with an accent so thick I couldn’t understand her.  Their language is the same as ours, but spoken in a different cadence with the vowels not sounding quite right.  Some of the eldest members of the settlement are the hardest to understand.  This is not Magaidh’s crannog.  This sturdy dwelling looks like a new addition with its fresh hazel saplings woven tight.

Finn lifts an arm in greeting, his face changing from a smile to furrowed confusion as he takes each of us in and lingers on Peete at my side, but it’s the woman sitting next to the fire that draws my attention.  She has Jo’s attention too.  Suddenly Jo is not moving forward with as much determination as before.

“Looks like you all have a story to tell,” Finn says, as he reaches out to chuck me under my chin with his fingers.  I strain to move my head far enough away to avoid him, but he manages to make contact with my jaw.  His triumph is marked with a bemused chuckle.  “What have you got there, Kat?”

“A Roman,” Peete answers for me.  “A legionary.”

Of course, the red of his cloak—though spattered with mud—makes that distinction more than evident.

Finn places his hand on his hips and leans slightly back.  He cocks one brow at me, looking vaguely impressed.  “Is that right?”

“Cattail is collecting Romans now,” Gael huffs, after he crosses his arms over his chest and raises his chin in greeting.

“Of course she is,” Finn says, his gaze drifting back to Peete.

I can see him take note of the way I hold Peete and the rope that tethers his arms together behind his back.  He’s reading us like a stone carving.

I scowl over at Gael, although he’s not so far off in his assessment of what I’ve done.  This is serious and we need Finn.  “We could use some help.”

“And a place to stay?” Finn prompts, since Gael is already making himself comfortable beside the fire and I’ve pulled Peete in close to the flames to warm ourselves after our time on the open water.  Only Jo stands back.

“Do you mind?” I ask.

“Not entirely sure, but I think I’d like to hear this story of yours.”

“Looks like you’ve got a story to share too,” Jowanet responds, her eyes still trained on the woman at Finn’s feet.

She’s a lovely young woman with flowing dark hair and eyes the color of lichen.  As attractive as she is, she doesn’t seem at ease with the attention we direct her way.  Instead of looking up at us, she closes her eyes.  Her hands move to grip her elbows, pulling in on herself.

“This is Annaig,” Finn says, as he crouches down and slips an arm over her shoulders.  At the press of his lips to her brow, her eyes open, fastening on his.  The muscles of her body visibly relax and she leans into him.  “These are my friends, Annaig.  Well, all except the yellow haired one.  I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

He stops his slow stroking of her upper arm.  “This is my wife.”

His smile nearly splits his face, as he looks at the woman held close to his side.  It isn’t Finn’s usual practiced smile; this smile is slightly off center and toothy.  It isn’t meant to seduce.  It shines with pure joy.

Finn has mentioned Annaig before, but I don’t think any of us really bothered to listen.  The girls in my settlement say Finn is a feast for the eyes.  You would have to be made of stone not to be distracted by him.  Even my little sister Primula blushes, when he turns his sea green eyes and seductive purr on her, though he means nothing by it.  He’s never alone.  Never lacks for company.  He is not the kind of man to settle with a wife and build a dwelling to call a home.

Except apparently he is.  Maybe I don’t really know Finn like I thought I did.

Once we establish that we’re staying, Jo announces that she’s going to chop wood for the fire and stalks off.  There doesn’t seem to be a tree on this narrow stretch of island, but no one tries to stop her.

I don’t quite understand what’s between Jo and Finn.  She’s known him longer than I have.  What they have goes deeper than friendship.  That’s been an unspoken reality for as long as I’ve known them.  How Annaig fits in, I’m not sure.

I have a feeling Jo needs to separate herself from the group.  Chopping wood is just an excuse.

When she returns empty handed and silent as the grave, we’ve already told Finn how we came upon a Roman and made him our captive, and Gael has asked for Finn’s help in ransoming him to the Romans.

“You didn’t want to bring him to your settlement, so you brought him to ours?”

Finn’s usual easy going attitude is gone.  He looks at Gael with eyes suddenly gone hard.

“We should have killed him alongside the road, but Kat wouldn’t have it.”

I am familiar with Gael’s opinions on the subject.  The only way we’ll defeat the Romans is by killing them.  All of them.  That should include Peete.

Peete has tensed as we’ve talked.  It must be dehumanizing to be talked about as if you’re not even there.  But, I’m not sure Gael thinks of Peete as a human.  Most of the time I don’t think of the Romans as humans either, but Peete is different.  I can’t explain to Gael why that is without exposing my own shame.  So, it’s my job to protect Peete.

“No harm comes to him.”

Finn chuckles.  “The Roman?”

“Yes, the Roman,” I say through gritted teeth.

Finn rubs his chin slowly, thoughtfully.  “You’re worried about your Roman captive?”

Gael looks over his nose at me.  I can tell he’s feeling smug that Finn finds my concern over Peete as foolish as he does.

“You might have thought about the safety of your friends first.  Both of you.”

“I have a plan.”

Gael sounds so steady, so certain.  He always has a strategy, but he hasn’t shared this plan with me.  Not the real one.  I can feel the divide between us growing steadily wider like a spring melt swollen river.  What makes my stomach churn is that I can’t be sure Gael’s plan will ensure Peete’s safety.  I have to ensure Peete survives.  I owe Peete; I owe him that much.

Finn sighs, his usual smile slowly returning.  “It better be a good one, Gael.”

“We need to get close to a Roman holdfast.”

“There’s a dun held by my people not far from a supply road and a marching camp that’s sometimes occupied below the River Earn.”

“Victoria,” Peete offers.

Everyone looks surprised to hear him speak.  Except for me.  He just wants to remind us that’s he’s here.  That he understands.  That he’s just as much a person and any of us.

Finn nods.  “Yes, that’s what they call it.”

Finn tells us it will take two days to get there once we’re on the mainland again.  None of us have ever been there.  Peete says he’s never been beyond the wall, and even if he had, I doubt anyone would trust him to take us to Victoria.

“And you have a plan that will protect my settlement from harm once he’s back amongst his own kind,” Finn presses Gael once more.

“Yes.”

He looks reluctant, but Finn said he’ll take us there.  That’s the only time Annaig’s face falters like she can’t stand the thought of her husband leaving her for even a few days.  She’s barely taken her eyes off of him since we arrived. 

I try to remember the things Finn has said about Annaig.  She’s from his settlement and she was taken some five harvests ago as a slave—a Roman slave.  That is all I can dredge up from my memories.  Someone must have bought her back, and from the looks of it, Finn never lets go of her hand now.  She seems to be lost in a haze of happiness.

It reminds me of my mà.  Annaig is probably all right, but that kind of dependency, that kind of love frightens me.  My sister and I nearly died because of it.

Finn doesn’t seem to resent Peete, as much as he does what smacks of our carelessness, endangering his settlement, his people, Annaig.  He even gives Peete a share of the cold smoked haddock that he caught in his nets in the deeper waters beyond their crannog.  Peete thanks him, as I untie his hands and rebind them in front of him, so he can feed himself.

Annaig, however, seems uncertain of him.  Until we finish the meal and Peete nods at her.

“Your necklace is beautiful.”

I’ve noticed that Peete comments upon beauty with great regularity.  Where I see a creek to cross or an oak to climb or a red deer to spear, he sees beauty.  I wonder what it is like to look through his blue eyes at the world, where survival does not dominate every waking moment.

Annaig’s hand hovers over the necklace, her eyes suddenly large.  She looks as if she’s afraid he’ll take it from her.  The necklace is made of a rope of little shells and ends in a heavy, clear crystallized quartz that looks like a much too perfect icicle with sharp angles.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  It certainly isn’t the typical silver jewelry that my people or the Damnonii wear.

“Annaig is very creative.”

Finn has spoken for her, but Peete only addresses Annaig, when he asks, “You made it?  Have you made others?”

Her fingers curl around the crystal.  “Yes.”

He goes on to explain that there was a man where he came from who worked with metals to create circular brooches worn at the shoulder and buckles and ornaments for their belts.  As he speaks, describing the shapes and colors, the smoothness of the metal, and the shine of the gems, Annaig leans forward, her hand slipping from her neck to rest in her lap.

“Like this,” he says, as he bends down to retrieve a whittled stick intended for roasting and holds it awkwardly in his bound hands to scratch the ground beneath our feet.

It takes him a few tries, obliterating the attempts he deems unsuitable with his boot, but eventually he is satisfied with his grip on the stick and the figures he draws in the fine pebbled, wet ground.  Annaig’s eyes follow his movements, her lips parting in rapt attention.  My eyes can’t help but follow them too.

I almost don’t notice Gael moving around the fire to speak low to Finn.  Sharing his plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alauna was a stronghold of the Damnonii. It is possible that it was located on the island of Inchkeith, which is located in the Firth of Forth.
> 
> Peete is probably Saxon, and he describes Saxon decoration.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He looks at me. For a moment it doesn’t feel impossible that someone would mistake me for a rhôn beauty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Pairing(s)** : Katniss/Peeta, Annie/Finnick, Johanna/Gale  
>  **Chapter Rating** : M for mild sexual content  
>  **Author's Note** : It is the promised crannog snuggling. What's a crannog?  
>   
> As for what comes next for Kat and Peete, the week of Christmas and the first week of January might be a little rough in terms of writing, but I hope to keep to my biweekly posting schedule. Feel free to follow me on tumblr and poke me if I get behind.

Chapter Four

As darkness settles over the water, we retreat into the relative warmth of the crannog.  The inside smells of the dried herbs that hang from the thatched roof and the sheep fleece that’s been stuffed into the hazel woven walls along with bracken to keep out the draft.  There’s something soothing about the scent.  If I close my eyes, it’s almost like I’m home with Primula and Mà.

Except there’s Peete beside me, shifting in the dark, his bulky form trying to get comfortable on the rushes with his hands tied before him.  Bedded down for the night, we’re the furthest from the flap to keep Peete from trying to escape, but it’s mostly for show.  I can tell Finn trusts him, otherwise Peete wouldn’t be allowed into his dwelling with Annaig and the rest of us. Finn smiles more easily than we do, but he can be just as deadly.  More so, though I’d never make the mistake of telling him he was better with a spear than the rest of us.  It would only make him more impossible.  So, if he thought Peete meant us harm, Peete would be tied to a post, no doubt, exposed to the elements, or Finn would spear him through the gut, forgetting Gael’s plan for the Roman altogether.

I trust him too.  Even if I can’t explain why to Gael.  His face let me know how little he thought of my assurances that I would sleep near the Roman here in the crannog to prevent his escape, as I’ve done every night previous.

The space inside Finn’s new dwelling is no wider across than fifteen lengths of my feet walking heel to toe.  It’s wide enough that even with men as tall as Gael and Finn spread across the floor, we all fit, but tight enough that the sounds of sleep will easily fill the space.  Not everyone’s breathing evens out, however, as the moon rises higher in the sky beyond my view.

I’m on my back with my hands tucked in my armpits for warmth, when I hear Jowanet stir.  I turn my head to the side to make sure she is all right.  Annaig and Finn are entwined between us, her head pillowed on his chest, something Jo must be hard pressed to ignore.  Jon wasn’t her usual self beside the fire: she was as silent as a frozen river, her eyes fixed sightlessly on the ground before her.  I think she wished herself anywhere but in this settlement on this shore.  I’m worried she might try to slip away in the dark now that she thinks we’re asleep.

She sits up and though the stars and moon are blocked from my sight, I can just make out the outline of her form well enough to see that she is stripped naked.  That’s not an unfamiliar sight, but I can’t imagine removing my cloak, let alone my long tunic and trousers on this chilly night, where even within the crannog I can see my breath fog the air.  There’s a purpose behind her actions, however, that’s more than clear to me when she climbs atop Gael.  He mumbles sleepily, asking an unintelligible question.  But he wakes quickly enough, when she leans down to press herself to his chest.  He grabs hold of her hips just as she lifts up on her knees and the settles back down.  I turn my head, when she begins to rock.

I stare up at the roof, screwing my eyes shut tight and willing myself to sleep, but her soft exhalations and Gael’s heavy breathing are a distraction.  I am even hyper aware of the rushes on the floor that scratch beneath her knees as she moves.  This is what they do.  Sometimes.  Though I wouldn’t think to call Jowanet Gael’s woman any more than I am his woman.

If we were alone, I would shout at them to be quiet, but Finn and Annaig are actually asleep and I’d only succeed in disturbing them.  It would be bad payment for their generosity.  I spare a glance sideways to see if Peete is also sleeping.

He’s not.

“Hey.”  He struggles against his binds, as if he wasn’t just staring at Jowanet.  In the dim light it looks as if his cheeks are flushed.  “What, are you going to watch?” I whisper.

He blinks rapidly.  “No.”  He huffs, while I continue to glare at him, daring him to deny it again.  Finally, he whispers, “It’s just hard not to listen.”

For some reason it’s harder than it should be tonight to ignore their sounds.  We sleep protected for the first night, and sleep should come easier, but the noises creep under my skin, making me pull my arms in tighter against myself.  It isn’t the only sound, just the one I find the most difficult to disregard.

I curl onto my side, putting my back to Gael and Jo.  “Listen to the bark of the rhôn,” I suggest softly, since that’s what I intend on doing.

The little line that forms between his brows lets me know he hasn’t understood.  Language has failed me.

There must be a sizable group of them somewhere further up the beach, and their barks carry through the night.  What the Roman’s might call them, I don’t know.  What Peete’s people would call the fat, grey sea creatures, I have even less chance of knowing.  So, I put my wrists together and flap my hands like flippers, trying to explain the only way I know how.  He nods in encouragement, wordlessly asking me to show him again.  I do my best to mimic the creatures’ movements, but when he presses his mouth into his shoulder, his eyes squeezing shut, my hands freeze.  He’s trying not to laugh at me.

“I should leave you tied up,” I say even as I roughly grab the ropes that hold him fast.

I’ve made a practice of untying him at night, and while Jo and Gael are still awake, they’re probably too busy to notice that I’ve freed him.  His joke annoys me and makes me feel foolish, but untying him gives me something else to focus on, something to do with my hands.  The desire to keep busy and ignore his teasing smile wins out.  Before I’ve finished undoing the knot, he’s already murmuring his thanks, his voice sounding like a smile, still pleased with his trickery, I suppose.  He rubs each wrist in turn, once he’s freed, and I can’t manage to be angry with him, when I can see the red chafed skin in my mind.

He puts his wrists together and moves his hands like mine.  I’m ready to turn my back on him and face whatever demonstration Jo and Gael are making, when he whispers, “Seolh.  That’s what we call them: seolh.”

“Oh.  Seolh,” I repeat, trying the foreign sounding word out on my tongue.  “That’s what your people call them,” I add just to be sure.

“The Romans call them sea dogs, phoca.”

They might bark, but these creatures are nothing like our dogs, which are fast and strong.  We use them in war to attack our enemies.  I’d like to see a Roman dog if the fat sea creatures remind them of dogs.

I like this: sharing things, teaching each other.  I think of other things I might tell him, so as to keep talking and learning.  “The rhôn can slip their bodies and become beautiful women.”

“Is that what you are then?  A rhôn?”

I roll my eyes.  Those beautiful women drown men in the waters, hold them down and steal their breath so they never walk on land again.  I don’t think I’ll teach him that part, because he looks at me in that heated way that I mistook for fever that first night.  For a moment it doesn’t feel impossible that someone would mistake me for a rhôn beauty—all sleek, dark hair, and grey eyes.

“Would a rhôn tell me if your friend’s plan ends with me face down in a shallow grave?”

“We burn our dead.”  He bites his lower lip, holding back another smile.  They come so easily for him, and they shouldn’t.  Not with his future in our hands.  “I don’t know the plan though.”

“Maybe it will be better as a surprise.”

I sigh and scrunch my nose, which I can barely feel in the cold.  “I saved you once.  You know I won’t let that happen.”  I hope he knows.  I hope he knows just like I know he won’t hurt me, because he saved me once too.

“Are you cold?”

His question startles me.  Normally I would be quick to put a stop to anyone’s concern about my comfort, because my comfort doesn’t matter.  But a shiver shakes me hard enough that my teeth clack together in my head, when I think of the damp cold coming off the water.  Despite the fire we’ve been sitting around, despite the cover of the crannog, the cold seems to have made a home in my bones.

He doesn’t ask permission before his unfettered arm snakes around my shoulder and pulls me into his side, his calloused hand smoothing over the length of my arm.  Every muscle in my body tenses like a prey animal.  The only man I’m close to is Gael and we would never press together like this.  I would rather shiver in the cold than admit such weakness.

And Peete could kill me like this.  He could. But he won't.

But he is warm.  Unaccountably warm.  And he smells like leather and earth and something underneath that makes my breath catch, and he wants to take care of me for some reason I can't fathom.  I realize it, as I breathe him in: Peete is the reason sleep escapes me tonight.  Peete being here with me, so close by, is what makes the sounds of wet flesh impossible to ignore.  Our proximity could lead to something other than my murder.

I bite my lip at the thought.

“I never knew cold like this before I came here.”  He turns his head and speaks right against my brow, close enough that if I stretched just a little, his lips would brush me.

My chest tightens.  Maybe Gael isn’t so far off in thinking I can’t be trusted.  I shouldn’t feel this way.  I shouldn’t be thinking such things.

“Why did you come if it was so perfect where you came from?” I spit back, retreating back into the spiteful rebel, which is a safer role than the unbalanced woman I seem to have become.

Someone moves behind me, possibly disturbed by my outburst, and Peete’s eyes focus on something I can’t see.  There’s a long pause, where we’re both perfectly still.

Finally, I feel him breathe again, and he whispers his reply, “The Roman army failed to take my preferences into account.”

Of course.  Soldiers are not free, just as we are not truly free.  Only, in the order of things, they stand over us, their boot heels pressing into our backs, while the Roman Empire does the same to them.

His hand grasps the tip of my braid.  I rebraided it again, running my fingers through the tangles before we chose our sleeping places for the night.  He’s silent, as he rolls it between his fingers, and I fear he can hear the war drum my heart has become at his touch.

“And it wasn’t perfect where I came from.”

There’s that pull again, the wanting to know him.  With Gael, we don’t need words, because we have history and we’re the same.  Peete is different from me.  I can sense it.  Different from his other legionaries too, based on what I know of Romans.  I don’t have long to understand him, and the pressure of time makes my tongue loose.

“What is it like then where you come from?”

“What’s it look like?” he asks, and although I’d listen to him tell me anything about his home, I indicate with a nod of my chin that my curiosity extends merely to appearances.  “Flat and marshy.  The land’s low.  There’s water everywhere, and we use boats almost more than we walk.”

I narrow my eyes at him.  “And you can’t swim?”

Peete shrugs, a movement that repositions me along his body and makes me more aware of the firm planes of his chest.  My hand goes still against him, the hand I almost slipped around his waist.  He lied to us.  I’ve trusted him, but Peete could very well be nothing but a very good liar.  He knows I’ve caught him in a lie and he seems totally unconcerned by it.  He could have lied about everything.

“Have you really seen my hillfort?”

“Yes.”

“And my sister?”

“Yes.”

“Describe her then.”

“She looks like me,” he says, looking bemused at my interrogation.  “Yellow hair, fair skin.  She holds your hand when you come to sell your things at the market.  What does she count, eleven years?”

“Twelve.”  I huff, because it would be easier if I could catch him in another lie, a lie about something personal, a lie he’d made to me, not the group, which is already suspicious of him.  If he’d lied to me, I could stop worrying about him.  It would mend the tear between Gael and me.  
  
Or perhaps the truth will be painful enough to shake him from my mind.  “Then why did you remember me?  Out of all the Votadini girls?  Am I that pathetic?”

“Gods, no.  I couldn’t save my family, but you’ve saved yourself and your family too.  There’s nothing pathetic about that.”  I can hear him swallow, and when he speaks again, I can barely hear him.  “I couldn’t help but notice.”

I don’t have time to think about what he’s just said or process the way he’s looking at me, when I hear Gael’s groan.

“Do they usually…” Peete begins to ask, but I touch my finger to his mouth—silencing him—and withdraw it just as quick.

Jowanet flops back in the rushes and the crannog goes properly silent.  With their passion spent, they’re like to hear us if we continue whispering like children up past dark.

Peete’s hand trails down my arm again, his fingers lacing with mine.  I don’t fight it, and I thank the gods for darkness.

…

We leave before dawn.  Even so, the sun will be nearing its highest point by the time we reach the shoreline to the northwest.  Finn says it will be a day and a half before we reach Victoria.  Not much time.  Long enough for some, however.  As we launch our boat, Annaig tosses a votive offering to Senuna into the water.  It’s something metallic that glints faintly as it arcs through the sky.  A piece of jewelry, a coin, or even a little piece of flattened gold or silver would be an acceptable offering to the goddess.  It’s meant to bring us luck as travelers.  She mustn’t have much faith in it, because she clings to Finn’s neck as if she’ll never see him again.  He strokes her hair back from her face and whispers things in her ear not meant for our hearing.  Promises, I imagine, and promises are hard to keep in this world.

The only promises I make are to Primula.  It’s better that way.

My sore muscles protest the effort it takes to pull the oars through the water so soon again after yesterday’s trial, but I clench my jaw and do my part, just like everyone else.  Except for Peete, who is still not considered trustworthy enough to row and who winks at me over deep waters after the boat rocks and he spreads his legs, pretending to be afraid.

“You’d sink to the bottom tied up,” I mumble.  Whether he can swim or no.  Even Finn would have trouble staying afloat with his hands tied, and I suspect he was a salmon in his last life.

“Good riddance,” Gael adds.

He’s right.  I know we’d be better off if Peete just disappeared.  We’d be better off if we never took him to begin with.  We endangered Finn’s settlement by bringing Peete to their shores, and though I know he won’t betray us, no one will feel safe until he’s gone from our company for some time.  Maybe even then they won’t feel safe.  Maybe the minute he’s back with his legion, they expect soldiers to start marching towards our hillfort, ready to make slaves of us all.

It would explain what Jowanet confesses to me after we’ve landed, leaning in so no one will hear, as we tromp through heavy undergrowth in the forest that stands between us and Victoria.

“You want to know Gael’s plan?”

I frown.  “He told you?”  I hope it isn’t because she lay with him last night.  I hope Gael’s not as petty as that.

“He can’t very well tell you.  He’s _your_ Roman.”

I think of Peete’s strong fingers knitted through mine and his curls brushing my brow.  “He’s not mine.”

She grins.  “It seemed like it to Gael.  With you two curled up.”  
  
I glare at her.  Gael and Jo share body heat all the time and I never comment.  They shared more than that last night.  “What does Gael care?”  Jo levels me with a look like I’m the dumbest person she’s ever laid eyes on.  “It was cold.”

She snorts.  “Somehow your Roman slips his bindings every night too.  And you can stop looking daggers at me: you weren’t the first one awake today, brainless.  Didn’t take any sneakiness to see that you untied him.”

I don’t want to discuss me and Peete.  There’s nothing to discuss, so I redirect, whacking at the tall growth before me.  “What’s Gael’s plan?”

“He doesn’t mean to ransom him to the Romans.”  I raise my brows, trying to hold back the anger that’s already beginning to boil inside of me.  Gael means to do something with Peete, something I won’t like, and everyone knows except for me.  “He’s going sell him.”

“Sell him?” I demand much too loudly, and Peete, who still stomps louder than all of the rest of us combined, looks over his shoulder at me.  He gives me an uncertain look, stumbles, and looks forward again.  “Like a slave?” I hiss.

Jo has the decency to look apologetic, when she says, “A strong Roman like him will fetch a high price.  The Caledonians will happily buy him.”

She doesn’t have to explain the rest of it, because I understand.  The Caledonians won’t care how we came to capture a Roman.  Peete will never see his legion again, and Roman forces will never know who was responsible.  Finn’s settlement will be safe and so will we.  We’ll all be safe.  It’s a good plan.

Except for the fact that it would make Peete a slave.

I can’t let it happen.  I can’t let anything happen to my Roman.  The Roman who saved me, who had the choice to kill us again and again and never took it.  The man who thinks I’m worth noticing.

“You couldn’t keep him, Kat.”

“Shut up,” I growl, as I step faster to reach Peete’s side and wrap my hand around his arm.

They can think I’m holding him fast or they can think I’m helping him through this underbrush or they can think I just want an excuse to touch him.  I don’t care.  I’m just waiting for my moment now, and then they won’t have to think anything about us at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seals can be found on Inchkeith and elsewhere on the shores of Scotland. The Scottish legend of the selkie inspired Katell's avowal that seals slip their skin to seduce and drown men. The origins of the legend are ancient but uncertain.
> 
> The Saxons inhabited what is now the Netherlands at this period in time, thus Peete's description.
> 
> The Britons left offerings for their gods much like Annaig does here. Annaig honors Senuna, a Celtic goddess that was worshiped in Romano-Britain.
> 
> The Caledonians, who they all dread, are the Picts, who the Romans were unable to conquer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We’re spread out to hunt—something Jowanet must be glad of, since she’s been edgy with Finn striding alongside us—but with Peete’s loud tread at my side, I’ve given up attempting to actually spear anything myself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As more people come across this story, I have received more questions about the history behind it. So, I'm adding notes to the chapters to better explain. This includes notes to the already published chapters. These can be skipped if you have no interest.
> 
> Thank you for all the interest that has been shown through comments, favorites, and kudos. I'm honestly surprised and thrilled by it. Follow my updates on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com/).

Chapter Five

“You’re upset,” Peete says, as we pick our way through the bracken.

I don’t know how he suspects it, because I haven’t spoken a word.  But I am.  I’m hurt.  More than I’d ever admit, because indulging my feelings like that is pointless.

I peer up at him, a ray of light breaking through the trees to momentarily blind me until his face comes back into view, the light catching in the yellow scruff of his newly growing beard and his long lashes.  He’s no where near as tall as Gael or Finn, but I’m one of the shortest women in my settlement, so I still have to crane my neck to look up at him.  If I wanted to be nose to nose with him, I’d have to rise up on my toes.

“What’s wrong?” he presses.

There’s the little line between his brows that I’m becoming familiar with, and I think when it appears this time it means he’s worried.  He should be worried about his own hide, but he’s worried about me.  He doesn’t know he’s just a sunset and sunrise away from being sold to be a slave.  Sold to the Caledonians, who will treat him like a beast of burden or worse—the worst repayment the gods could inflict upon him for saving my life.  But the gods are not to blame.

I glance over my shoulder to ensure that no one walks noiselessly behind us.  We’re spread out to hunt—something Jowanet must be glad of, since she’s been edgy with Finn striding alongside us—but with Peete’s loud tread at my side, I’ve given up attempting to actually spear anything myself.  My spear is strapped to my back and I use both hands to brush back branches that would otherwise whip Peete’s face without his own hands free to stop them.

Gael would glare at me, should he know, but he’s as good a hunter as me and all is not lost.  Hopefully he will be blessed by Cocidius, or we’ll be hacking away at the frozen ground for roots and tubers to eat.  If that’s the case, it won’t be nearly enough food to fill our bellies after a hard day of rowing across the water and pushing through thick forest.

All we took with us as we left Finn’s crannog was enough smoked fish to keep us through the day.  Finn could have given us more food from his stores, but they weren’t that deep and it was clear to all of us that Annaig’s needs came first.  That’s where his loyalty should lie, so none of us grumbled.  Kin first.  Your own kind second.  Friends come last of all.

I don’t know where rescued Romans should come in that hierarchy, but surely not at the top.

“They’re keeping things from me,” I answer, when I’m certain no one is within earshot.

“Your friends?”

His question or the insinuation makes me defensive.  It doesn’t help that I’ve been asking myself the same thing—are these my friends anymore?—but it’s my choices that are causing the divide, not Gael or Jo’s.

“They’re doing what they think is best.  For us, for my people.”  Even if what’s best means keeping things from me, their no longer sane friend.

“That’s as it should be,” he nods, as he steps over a fallen log that looks like it’s the home to a whole colony of insects in warmer days.

“They just don’t trust me to do the right thing.”

I can make a plan too.  I can make a plan that will save Peete and keep all of us safe as well.

“I trust you,” he says so sincerely that I feel a stab of guilt deep in my gut, even though I’m going to save him, I am.  Just knowing what Gael wants to do makes me feel like I’ve betrayed Peete.

Why does he trust me?  He’s old enough to know better.  I first saw him three harvests ago, and all Roman soldiers are men, not boys, so I know he must count more than twenty years.  Most likely he’s older than Gael, and Gael would never be so foolish as to trust a stranger the way Peete trusts me.  Gael is wary and distrustful.  Like I usually am.

“Why?”

“Because you take care of people.  Your sister, your mother, me.”

I care for those I love, those he’s named alongside himself.  I will fiercely defend them and see them safe.  I will feed them, clothe them, and keep them warm, but I’m not a gentle person by nature.  I’m violent.  Manipulative.  Deadly.  I’ve killed people.  It might even have been my spear that broke his skin.  But for a few inches, he could have ended up another man in my count.  The longer he stays at my side, the more that thought bothers me.

“Jo thinks I want to keep you.”

I must be hungrier or more tired than I thought, because I shouldn’t have said that to him.

He laughs under his breath and casts a look sideways at me.  “Do you?”

Maybe.

I have my plan or I will soon.  I’ll have all the details of what to do with Peete, but as I work it out, I can’t actually bring myself to share it.  Not even with Peete.

“I want to spear a boar, is what I want.”

I sniff the cold air, and the only smell that fills my nose is the sharp, cool scent of pine.  I imagine instead the heavy smell of boar and the fat crackling as it hits the fire, and my mouth waters in response.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve had something so delicious, even though lamb is my favorite.  I like it young and tender, cooked just long enough that the inside is still red and dripping with juices, but it’s a rare thing that we can spare one that young from Primula’s flock.  My belly growls, echoing my statement, and I know well enough that it would be happy with a scrawny red squirrel.

“We might call for the others if you intend on bringing down a boar.”  He’s right.  I’m good with a spear, better than most, but you need more than one spear or one man—no matter how broad—to bring down a boar.  Besides, Peete’s hands are bound and he may have no skill at hunting for all I know.  If I would try to do it myself, both Peete and I could end up with a thick tusk in our sides.  “Or we could call upon the help of our shadow.”

“Shadow?”

He stops walking, turning so that the breadth of his body stops me as well, my hand coming up to rest flush against his chest.  He licks his chapped lips and leans down far enough that the curls over his ears brush my cheek—close like we were last night with his arm wrapped around me.

“There’s a little girl following us.”

His warm breath stirs the hairs on my neck that are too short for my braid, and I blink, trying to process what he’s said.  I’m as still as one of the Roman’s elaborately carved altar statues made of stone, barely moving my lips to ask, “Are you sure?”

If Peete is right, I should have noticed that we were being followed long before he did.  It’s potentially more evidence that Gael is right and that I’m not my usual careful self with Peete around.  Or maybe Peete is simply better at observation than he is at walking undetected.

“Well, it’s either a little girl or a bold ælfe.”

I frown at his use of a word I don’t recognize, but when I pull back, I can see amusement dancing in his eyes.

He continues to murmur, dipping back close to me once more, “When we split off to hunt, she kept following us.  She’s maybe eleven or twelve years, so no real danger.”

Primula.  She comes to my mind before he tilts his head slightly to the right, before I can look in the direction he’s indicating.  Of course we’re too far from our settlement for her to have followed us, we’ve travelled for too long.  We would have noticed by now if she’d sneaked away to track us, because she is not at home on the move the way I am or in any way skilled at survival, but my hands close on his bicep in a burst of anticipation nonetheless.

My sister.  I miss her.  I want to know that she is safe and cared for, when there is no one but my weak, neglectful mà to watch over her.  I’ve told my mà that she can’t disappear, when the rebellion draws me away from home.  But a part of me will never trust her.  Only the sight of my sister well and fed can calm my fears.

I shift my gaze in time to see a dark little head disappear behind a towering conifer, wide enough to easily conceal the wiry frame of one so young.  Her dark hair could mark her as a member of Finn’s people, who are mostly dark of hair like Annaig, unlike Finn, who is large limbed and red haired like a Caledonian.  On the mainland, north of the wall, she also could be a member of the Venicones, who I am told have more in common with the Damnonii than our fearsome enemies further north.

Whatever the case, Peete is right: at eleven or twelve, it is unlikely that we’re in any danger from a little girl.  Unless she’s not alone.

“She’s alone?”

“You’re alone, aren’t you?” Peete bellows good-naturedly, and I smack his chest with the back of my hand for his carelessness.

He laughs again, totally unconcerned with disturbing the quiet.

“You must be a terrible soldier,” I hiss.

“Yes,” he agrees with raised brows.  “I think you proved that on the road to Trimontium.”

And when he failed to keep the Roman grain safe from grasping Votadini hands too.  His interaction with me has proven him unfit time and again.  Peete doesn’t belong in the Roman army.  He deserves a different life.

His smile fades, as he adds, “She could be hungry.”

“Well, we’re not going to catch anything with you shouting out into the woods like a mad man.”  Even the deafest forest creature has fled his heavy footfalls and accompanying chatter.

He shifts, his muscles straining against his bindings, but he looks completely unapologetic, staring down at me, waiting for me to act.

He doesn’t have long to wait, because as soon as I thought of my sister, I knew what I had to do.

“Stay here,” I command before I stalk away from Peete to seek out our little shadow.

As I approach the girl tucked behind the tree, I hold my arms outstretched to show that I hold no weapon at ready.  Seeking her out is yet another questionable decision, but I can’t get Primula’s boney little arms and legs out of my mind.  This little girl has taken a risk by following us, so it’s likely that she is driven by hunger, as Peete suggested.  I’d want someone to help Primula if she was alone and hungry, so if this little one will let me get close, I decide to see what I can do for her.

“Hello,” I greet her, though all I can see of her are her grubby fingers wrapped around the rough bark of the trunk.  “Hey, it’s all right.  I won’t hurt you.”

Round, dark eyes finally peer out from behind the tree, looking up at me from about the same height as my sister.  Peete was right: she can’t count more than twelve years.  Other than her height and age, she looks little like my yellow haired sister.  Her face is painted not in woad like a warrior, but in dark clay that would make her difficult to see in the dark.  I imagine it renders her nearly invisible, which is probably the only reason she’s still alive out here in the forest alone.  Otherwise the odds would not be in her favor.

“Hello,” she says as quiet as a house mouse.

Her accent reminds me of that of the older members of Finn’s settlement.  I wager she’s one of his people after all.  Although the matching, massive, bronze armlets she wears on each arm are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  I wonder if they’re anything like what Peete described to Annaig and me before the fire.

“Are you lost?”

She shakes her head in the negative.  It’s best she’s not, because I don’t know how I’d help her if she was.

“Hungry?”

She draws back, disappearing partly behind the tree.  She bites her lip, looking reluctant to admit it, but as she pulls back, she presses her hand to her middle.  I know what it’s like to hold your hand to your belly, trying to stave away the pains of hunger, but she might not even know she’s given herself away.  Hunger can make you less cautious, just as my desire to keep Peete safe has made me reckless.

“We don’t have anything.  Our bags are empty,” I say, gesturing to the bag tied at my waist.

Her face falls, and I think of Primula, when we had no food to eat and her little face would screw up in pain but the tears would refuse to fall, her body too weak even to cry.  I kneel down to be more at her height.  The dampness of the ground immediately seeps through my trousers, but I fight the chill by sticking my hands under my arms.

“Wait until tonight.  I’ll give you what I can.  Just stay quiet, stay back.  Don’t let anyone see you.  All right?”

She nods her head quick and eager, her lip sucked into her mouth once more.

Gael hates that I’m sharing our rations with Peete, and while I imagine Finn wouldn’t mind giving food to one of his own, particularly one this small, I don’t want to start unnecessary trouble, when I still have Peete to save.  It’s best if no one knows.

I reach out to straighten her ratty, brown cloak stained with mud and full of burs, the way I do to Prim when hers is askew on her shoulders.  She flinches, but allows my touch.  The world is full of people who want to trust me today.

I smooth out the shoulders and pat her, as I tell her, “We need a sign, so you know when to come near.”

Her toe swirls in the frost covered leaves, as she looks down, murmuring, “The song of the crossbill?”

I pause, thinking whether I know which bird song she means.  The crossbill isn’t a bird I can picture and the soft whistle she makes, imitating the bird, in the space of my silence is unknown to me as well.

“Again,” I prompt her, my head swiveling, as I begin to fear one of our group will happen upon us.

She duplicates the bird call once more, and I commit it to memory, echoing it back to her once.  The sound of it reverberates through the trees.

“Tonight?” she asks, her little voice going higher, buoyed up by hope.

I nod to her even as I stand and begin to back away.  “Tonight,” I mouth exaggeratedly, holding my hand out to keep her from following too close.

Tonight I’ll give her my whole share if need be.  I’ll make sure her belly is full.

I jog back to Peete and give him a stiff smile.

“Is she hungry?”

“Yes,” I say, slipping my hand back around his arm and urging him forward.  “Don’t worry.  I’ll take care of it later.”

“See.  You take care of people.”

I can hear the satisfaction in his voice.  He’s convinced he understands me.  I don’t think he’s right.  This version of me Peete’s painted, who cares for people, who is strong, who is worth noticing, is a woman I don’t know.  A woman Peete might find appealing.

“Like your wife takes care of you?”

“No wife.  No child.  No home, Kat.  Nothing to go back to.”

“Except Veluniate and the Second Legion.”

“I’d rather not go back there.”  The heaviness in his voice makes me believe him, although the promise of regular meals and a bed to sleep in makes the Roman fort seem like a dream compared to what we might soon endure.  Selling him to the Caledonians would be a crime, but perhaps my original intention of handing him back to the Romans is not much kinder given his sentiments.  “We’ll have to see what the Fates have in mind for me though, won’t we?”

“I don’t believe in the Fates.”  The Fates are Roman gods of which I have no use.

“Good.  Neither do I.”

“We’ll make our own fate.”

Now I’m doing it: I’m talking about Peete and I as if we’re an ‘us’, as if I’ve cast our fates together.

I tug him harder.

“Was that you singing?” he asks, as he ducks a branch I missed holding back in my rush to catch up with our scattered group or outrun this conversation.

I shrug.  “It was just a bird call.  A signal for later.”

I used to sing, but I haven’t properly sung since my da died.  It reminds me too much of him.  Mà used to say the very birds in the trees would stop to listen to my da sing.  The Romans took him from me, from my mà, from all of us.

Peete pulls his arm in closer to his body, close enough that the back of my fingers are pressed to his side, drawing my attention up to his open face.  There’s a question there, the same look of concern, as if he’s heard the sadness in my voice.

My father’s death wasn’t his fault.  He’s different from the other Romans.

I shake off the flutter of grief in my chest and repeat, “It was just a bird call.”

“A bird call?  No bird sounds that beautiful.”

I sigh in frustration at these outrageous statements of his.  “Don’t.”

“You’ve got my hands tied up, so I feel like I should be allowed to say what I want.”

He smiles as if being tied up as a prisoner is funny, as if this whole situation somehow amuses him, and I shake my head.

“What’s your game?”

He didn’t try anything with me last night, other than to keep me warm, and I felt safe waking up in his arms, held unlike I’ve been held since my da died.  But he’s not kin, he’s not my people, and these compliments must have a purpose.  I think of his eyes on Jo and Gael in the dark of the crannog and my cheeks heat.

“No game.  It was beautiful.”

He sounds as sincere as he did last night, when he asked if I was a rhôn beauty, though it might just be that the gods have made him silver tongued.

“You shouldn’t put store in beauty,” I lecture, because beauty doesn’t fill a storehouse or a belly.

“You’re right, but appreciating beauty wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, it wouldn’t count as a weakness, except when it comes to you.”

I grab the next threatening branch and hold it back, as we duck under together, my shoulder pressed into the solidness of his side.

“You don’t have to convince me to save you, Peete.  I said I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

He doesn’t allow me to drag him relentlessly forward for a half beat, planting his feet and becoming an unmovable mass.  His voice is low, when he speaks, and I can hear someone else nearby—Gael or Jo or Finn—moving just out of sight, where they might over hear.  “You let me know when you’re convinced that it’s more than that.”

I hope never.  I’m already making dangerous choices.  If he convinces me he thinks of me as anything but a rescuer, I’m afraid I’ll be overwhelmed.  By guilt.  By confusion.  By something I refuse to name.

“Watch your step, Roman,” Jo’s brash voice calls out, her ax held high.

And I push him away.  I must push him away even as I keep him safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cocidius was a god worshiped in northern Romano-Britain, who the Romans equated with Silvanus, who was a god of the forest and fields. Evidence points to Cocidius being worshiped by both Britons and lower ranking Roman soldiers, so it would be a god with whom Peete was familiar.
> 
> Roman soldiers had to be 20, but on occasion were as young as 17 or 18.
> 
> Wild boar could be found in Scotland until the late medieval period, when it was hunted to extinction.
> 
> Despite what Katell thinks, the little girl is probably is from the Venicones, who lived north of the wall and had much in common with the Taexali:  
> 
> 
> The Scottish Crossbill is known for its distinctive song.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think of the yellow haired Roman, who has a way with words that leaves me fumbling. After tonight I’ll be alone with those words, alone with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been posting teasers and photos on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com) for those who would like to keep in contact between updates or are looking for more information. Lots of squee too. I wasn't expecting much of anyone to be into a Hunger Games story set in 2nd c. Romano-Britain, so I continue to be overwhelmed by the support you all have shown. Thank you. Historical notes at the end of this chapter.

Chapter Six

We bed down for the night, arranging ourselves in a ring around the dying embers of a fire that will not keep us warm for long, but I won’t be here to freeze with the rest of them.  Neither will Peete if all goes according to plan.  We will be freezing elsewhere without even a fading fire to warm our bones.

But I still have one task to accomplish before we can disappear.  There is the hungry little girl, who Peete noticed first, as we trudged through the forest.  Our meal tonight was humble, our hunting efforts not amounting to much, but I have saved something, stashed away some sweet tasting squirrel meat—the majority of my remaining portion after giving Peete half.  I’ve kept it for the dark haired girl, who reminded me of Primula.

It’s easy enough to wander away to relieve myself and wander farther yet, while the group’s voices grow fainter in the gloom and only the sound of my boots crunching over the frosted forest floor remains.  I imitate the bird call, the one Peete called beautiful, and while I strain to see the first glimpse of the girl emerge from the trees around me, I think of the yellow haired Roman, who has a way with words that leaves me fumbling.  After tonight I’ll be alone with those words, alone with him.

He’ll have heard the call.  He’ll know it was no bird, but me.  I wonder if his broad body is curled towards the fire, if he’s thinking my voice is beautiful or whether he merely says these things to save himself, to convince me of something that has no basis in fact.  Whether it is more than an act as he claims or just a carefully constructed lie meant to encourage me to like him, to make me want to help him.

I’d help him either way.  I owe him.  I don’t have to like him.  Part of me still doesn’t want to like him.

There’s a darting in the darkness.  A shadow come to life.  The moon’s pale light is so obscured by the trees that I almost can’t make her out as a girl child until she’s behind the tree right before me crouched down with one eye peeking out.

I squat down too and dig in my pouch for the squirrel I wrapped in a dried, leathery leaf that wouldn’t crumble to pieces.  It’s cooled but you can still smell the smoky sweetness of it, when I pull it free.  She crawls forward, her bottom lip bitten in evident anticipation as I hold it out to her.

“This is all we had,” I apologize, as she takes the bundle from my hand and unwraps it hurriedly.  Her teeth are already sinking into the flesh by the time I add, “No boar,” thinking of my earlier conversation with Peete.

She looks up at me with wide eyes, shaking her head slowly, as if I’m half mad.  Squirrel is probably a feast for her, boar an unthinkable luxury.  My family is better fed now thanks to me, but I know want it’s like to have your mouth water at the sight of a rotting tuber.  I’m going to leave and there will be no one to help her after this.

“Katell,” I say, tapping my chest with my first two fingers and then nodding at her in turn.

She hesitates for only a moment to swallow before murmuring, “Rowena.  Ro.”

“It’s dangerous out here alone.”

She shrugs, her dark, shining eyes darting from me to the last bites of meat held clutched in her hands.  “I’m fast.  Nothing can catch me to hurt me.”

Fast enough to outrun a brown bear?  Or a pack of slathering wolves?  No one is that fast.

“You need people.  Allies.”

Her tone is even, her eyes fixed upon the squirrel meat, when she whispers, “I could help you.  With things.  I know the forest.”

She sounds carefully measured, but her tone can’t hide how eager she is to please.  It’s familiar to me, increasing the sense that I know her.  I look at her and it’s like I’m looking at Primula.  So, I smile at her the way I smile at my sister, when she shows me something she’s proud of, some small accomplishment that our mà is too distant and sunk in the past to recognize.

“I bet you do.  I bet no one knows it better.”

But knowing the forest and being able to disappear within it won’t keep her safe forever.  It certainly hasn’t kept her belly full.

There has to be a way to keep her safe.  Even if I didn’t have Peete to save from enslavement, I wouldn’t be here long enough to make a difference, but I can’t leave her unprotected.  I can’t walk away without trying.

“I’m not going to be leaving, I have to go, but my friends are good.  They wouldn’t hurt you.  Finn, with the fiery hair?  Tall?” I say, lifting my hand above my head.  Her head tilts.  She knows the one I mean.  “I think he would help you.  Give you food.”

Or take her back to Alauna.  After they discover I’m gone, there will be nothing keeping Finn from going back home, and Annaig would welcome someone so small and in need of help into their crannog, wouldn’t she?  Ro would be safer with them than she would with a limping Roman and me on the run.  Safer, better fed, warmer.

Ro’s thick, dark brows draw together.  She doesn’t believe me.  I’m not even sure if I truly believe the story I’ve spun.  None of us can afford to help strangers, when we’re all barely surviving.  The world is cruel and there are precious few one could call kind in it.  Someone like Peete is rare.  He helped me even when it meant he would be punished.  He’d want to help Rowena too if he could.

“Finn’s one of your people.  I think,” I lamely add, watching as she licks her already empty fingers clean.

She’s quiet, declining to look up at me or respond in any way.

I don’t have much time.  The group will be missing me, wondering where I’ve gone off to.  I can’t make anyone suspicious.  Not tonight.  And Peete and I need as much of the night’s dark cover as we can get.

“Promise me you’ll try to catch his eye.  Finn.  He’s red of hair, sticks out like a stubbed toe.  Tell him I told you to seek him out.”

She finally bobs her head, her round face still looking down.  I reach out to ruffle her hair before I find my feet to hurry back towards our meager camp.  It’s not me, touching people like that, but it’s what I’d do with my sister and Ro needs a sister, she needs someone.

…

Finn is given the first watch tonight, and he’s much too dedicated to it, for no matter how long I wait for his eyes to droop, he’s still sitting there, hunched over methodically tying knots in a rope.  I watch him through slitted eyes, tracking his movements through the black screen of my lashes, hoping that his hands will grow slack, that his breathing will slow.  But his movements remain maddeningly steady and even, although I can’t imagine for what purpose.  He tugs and pulls and loops the rope, and our opening to escape grows ever smaller.  I wish he was a little more careless, but Finn shows no sign of letting sleep overwhelm his duty to the group.

Perhaps if he had indulged in more of his share of the beer—the only other thing Finn brought with him from Alauna to share on our journey—he might dose.  On not nearly full enough bellies, Jowanet and Gael certainly seem properly sunk into dreamless sleep from their imbibing.  I send up a quick prayer to the goddess Latis that her powers will work soon enough on Finn as well and make his eyes heavy like river stones.

Peete, despite having had no share of the beer, sleeps, his breathing deep and his chest brushing my back with every inhalation.  Under Finn’s constant watch I haven’t even been able to free Peete of his restraints so that he might sleep easy, but after a day’s exertion, it doesn’t seem to matter much to Peete’s weary body.

“You might as well get some rest, Kat,” Finn murmurs, smirking as he unties a knot.  “I’m not going to get any less pretty without you eying me up all night.”

I shut my eyes tight, but I can hear him softly chuckling to himself at my ill concealed deception, which has proven to be a failure.  I realize there’s no reason to pretend any longer, so I push up on my hands until I’m upright.  With my legs crossed underneath me, I face him from across the burnt remains of the fire.  I keep my face blank, unwilling to give anything away.  There are many things that could keep a woman awake at night: the cold, a growling belly, the hard ground beneath my back.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asks, his voice low like a lynx’s purr.

 My pulse immediately begins to pound.  I squint at him, but he continues at his mindless task, his eyes still trained on his knot tying.  How does he know something is afoot?  I didn’t even tell Peete my plans, so there would be no chance of mistakenly giving ourselves away.  That might have been a mistake: I have no skill at crafting lies, and it might come easier to Peete.  He might have covered for my clumsy manner of exposing myself through word and deed if I had given him the chance.

“You’re going to wake everyone up with your chatter,” I whisper, as if the group’s rest is my most pressing concern, as if I’m known for my thoughtfulness.

He looks up from his knots to glance at Gael and Jowanet, whose short, lean leg is draped halfway over Gael’s lanky form, their closeness carrying over from the previous night, when they lay together in Finn’s crannog.  “Can’t have that.”

He peers through the darkness at Peete, and a chill runs up my back.  I don’t want to have to fight Finn, but I’m not going to let him wake Gael.  I’m not going to let anyone sell Peete.

“I thought it was an act, when you showed up at Alauna.  Something to make Gael jealous.  That’s not it though, is it?”

Gael?  Why would I ever attempt to make Gael jealous?  I want to curl my lip and wrinkle my nose at his audacity at suggesting such a thing.  I manage some semblance of control, however.  Instead of giving in to my irritation and playing into his questioning, I refuse to answer, crossing my arms over my chest.

With little effect, since he keeps fiddling with his knots with that teasing smirk on his face.

“So, either you should get some sleep and follow along with us tomorrow to Victoria…”

“We’re not going to Victoria,” I interrupt, letting the anger I feel at being lied to and Finn’s inquest bubble over like an unwatched cook pot.  “Are we?”

One brow shoots up.  “If you suspect otherwise, then perhaps you better get on with untying your Roman.”

I twitch, wanting to go to Peete immediately at Finn’s words, but I still my eager body to watch my friend.  I’m not good at reading people, at judging their motives and gauging their emotions, but I have my hunter’s instincts.  I try to read his body language to see if he seems relaxed and means to let me go or if his muscles are tense and ready to fire.  He doesn’t appear as if he’s ready to wake Jo and Gael.  He doesn’t appear ready to do anything other than smile at his own cleverness.

I don’t know what would happen if Finn sounded the alarm.  If Gael knew my intentions, would he bind my wrists too?  Or would he just finish what he started on the road to Trimontium and hack Peete’s head from his body and leave it to be eaten by scavenging forest creatures and carrion crows.

I can barely speak around the lump that’s formed in my throat, when I say, “Annaig was a slave.”

I’m afraid he’s not going to respond, that I’ve angered him with the comparison—his dear Annaig akin to a _Roman_ —because he stares silently back at me with only Gael’s soft snores disrupting the night’s cold, grave silence for ten beats of my hammering heart.

Until he nods.  Just once.

He might just understand, and that’s when I know for certain that I have to take a chance on trusting Finn.  I have to trust that he’ll at least give us the head start we need before shaking the rest of my friends awake—friends who are faster than Peete, friends who can track a human as easily as they can track an animal, friends who might consider my decision an unforgivable betrayal.

There is not a moment to lose and no time to reconsider my decision.  I twist, turning my body to Peete still lost to slumber.  My hands fumble in the dark for the rope that holds his sore wrists together, retied before him, so he could sleep.  At the touch of my cold hands to his chapped flesh, his eyes open, fair weather blue glazed over with drowsy confusion meeting what must be my own sharp, desperate gaze.  I put my first finger to my lips, pausing in my hurried motions to instruct him to stay quiet.

He’ll think I’m merely freeing him for the night, but soon enough he’ll know.

His hands unfettered, I tug on his arms, pulling him upright.  My heart is in my mouth as I stand beside the fire, my eyes darting from Peete, who is making much too much noise, and Finn, who is still relentlessly tying and untying that damn flaxen rope.  Gael’s continued snoring is the only reassurance I have that we haven’t yet lost hope.

As we step away, my hand knitting together with Peete’s, as we leave the comfort of the group behind us, the shelter of the fire, and Finn’s watchful eye, even the snoring fades.  It is just us.  Peete and I moving through the forest.  We travel due south, not quite a reversal of our previous path.  We’ll never make it over the wall and the barrier posed by the Ochil Hills would make travel more or less impossible, so we can’t head southwest and to travel southeast back towards the shoreline that faces Alauna would be foolish.  They’ll expect that we change direction.  They’ll be on our heels by the time dawn’s fingers reach over the ground’s blanket of frost.  Even earlier if gods—Peete’s or mine—are not on our side.

My hand holds fast to his, as his breathing grows heavy, as I drag him forward, him stumbling over things I easily miss even in the dark, and I squeeze tighter.  I know we’re making too much of a racket.  At least whatever night predators lurk in the forest will be warned of our presence by Peete’s heavy footfalls; I can’t worry about anyone else they might wake.

“Where are we going?” he finally pants.

I could scold him for talking, but the only way the group could hear us now is if they’re already following us, and I have to pray that Finn meant to give us longer than that to flee.

“Away.”

I’m not exactly sure where we’re headed.  We will eventually need to get across the water and we have no boat.  All I know is that we need to put distance—more distance—between us and them.

It isn’t much of an answer, but it seems to satisfy Peete, for he follows at my side or a step behind, trusting to my unexplained motives.

We continue on, pressing through the dark at a grueling pace even when my eyes begin to burn and my muscles beg for rest.  We can’t afford to stop.  If we can walk through the night and into the early morn, we might reach the shoreline and I might be able to determine how best to proceed from there.

If we don’t encounter another settlement.  A hostile group of hunters.  A marching band of Romans.

If my friends don’t catch up with us first.

But none of those things happen.  We don’t even make it until dawn.

Peete’s step falters.  The heavy weight of his body jerks me, almost forcing me to my knees, until he catches himself, swaying on his feet.

“I have to stop.”  He bends at the waist, his hands clasping his knees.  “I have to rest.”

It’s then that I see it: the bright red of fresh blood spreading over his trousers.

I grip him under the arm, urging him over to a tree that can support his weight.

“What happened?” I ask, as he slumps to the ground.

His face contorts as he stretches his leg out, his hands holding tight to his wounded thigh.

“Just the exertion.  ‘s too much,” he slurs.

Even in the cold, drops of sweat stand out on his brow, and I know this isn’t good.

I don’t know what to do for him.  My hands reach out to touch him, but my hands are not skilled.  I curse not for the first time since we attacked Peete that I lack the knowledge that my sister or my mà have in abundance.  I’ve done for him all I can already and it might not be enough after all.

Water.  We’ve been walking almost without rest, without stopping to take water.  But my skin is still full from earlier in the day, when I filled it to the brim.  My fingers go to my waist, the cold making them painfully slow to respond, as I attempt to free it from my belt.  I need to wet his lips and quench his thirst.  That should help.  That should revive him.

“Here,” I urge, as I pull the top off and bring the skin to his lips.

Water and then a fresh bandage.  I’ll tie it better.  He can rest.  He’ll be better.  He has to be.

Some of the water dribbles down his chin.  My arm shakes, jostling the skin against his lips until his hand comes up, covering mine, steadying it and me.  I can see him swallow by the roll of his throat over the linen tied about his neck, draining the skin until it’s about half as light as a moment earlier.

“Take the rest,” he sighs, his arm flopping down to his side.

I can go longer without and I should urge him to drink his fill—I’ll find a spring or a stream that isn’t entirely frozen over tomorrow—but when his eyes close, my tongue does not respond.  Maybe the cold has slowed my body as well, for I stare at the glistening beads of water in his newly growing beard and the wetness of his lips.  I trace the sharp line of his jaw, the cords in his neck, as he leans his head back against the trunk of the tree.  And even in this dim light there is the fan of his pale lashes against his cheek that I can’t miss.  His lashes are so long that the girls of my settlement would be jealous.

It’s when his eyes blink back open that I realize I’m crouched with the skin still outstretched, staring uselessly.  Pulling back the skin, I mumble something about him needing a new bandage.

He doesn’t need much prodding, since he grasps the band of his trousers in his hands and pushes back against the tree to raise his hips and tug downward without another word from me.

I turn my head, staring down at the frozen earth.

Mirth tinges the fatigue of his voice, when he says, “You’ve seen it before.”

Not entirely.  I was careful not to look.

My people think nothing of nudity.  Jowanet strips down to her bare flesh whenever the mood strikes and Gael sometimes fights without a shred of clothing to cover his long limbs and slim torso, but the Romans are always well covered.  They are not as accustomed to the cold, mà says, but there are rumors, whispers amongst some of the other girls in my settlement, I think to myself as I tear another strip of linen to tie about his pale thigh.  They say that the Roman men hide something monstrous beneath their long-sleeved tunics, their trousers, and their long cloaks.

Certainly they’re wrong.  I could have asked Jo, but she’d find too much amusement in my curiosity, and I don’t believe them truly.  Peete’s just a man.

It might only be to distract himself from the pain, but it surprises me when he asks about Rowena.  “Did you find her?”

“Yes.  I gave her the food.”

“Good,” he says with a terse nod.

“I told her to go to Finn.  I think he’ll help her.”

I shouldn’t look to him to reassure me, I shouldn’t depend on him to calm my fears, but that’s exactly what he does, when he says, “You did the right thing.”

Finn helped us.  He’ll help Ro.

With the new bandage wrapped around the wound, my fingers work at the knot and he warns with a hiss, “Not too tight,” as I finish.

I give him time to pull his trousers back up before putting my back into the tree as well.  We can’t afford to rest.  We’re out in the open, no fire, no protection from searching eyes.  Our situation here beneath towering conifers and a frosted floor beneath our seats only increases the chance that the rest of the group will catch up to us, but Peete needs this time to recover.

“Try to rest.  We’ll get moving again at first light.”

I can feel him looking at me, but he says nothing.  It makes me too aware of each breath I take, the rise and fall of my breast, and the placement of my hands in lap.  I run the back of my hand over my brow, pushing back hair that has freed itself from my braid to give myself something to do with my hands, which feel fidgety and awkward.

But when my hand comes to rest in my lap once more, Peete’s covers it, his large fingers wrapping around mine.  He’s not as warm as he was last night, when he enfolded me in his arms, but his hand still seems sturdy and strong.

I suddenly feel like I’m standing on the edge of a sea cliff with the wind whipping at my cloak ready to carry me out over the waves.

“You could have let them do whatever it was they were planning.”

We’ve been holding hands all night but now it feels different.  It feels _more_.  And I’m afraid to look at him, afraid to meet his intense gaze.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Kat,” he says, reaching up with his free hand to tilt my chin, his palm sliding around my jaw, his long fingers slipping into my hair and spreading over my cheek.

And then his lips are on mine and my heart skips hard against my ribs.  The rest of him might be cold, but his lips are warm.  They are slightly chapped, but gentle against mine, gentler than I would have imagined.  If I had imagined.  If I had lain in the circle of his arms last night, thinking of his lips pressed against mine.

He’s kissing me, and it might be an act.  It might be more.

I respond, curling my body to face him, bumping my nose into his to slant my mouth against his.  I respond too late, I think, for he’s already leaning back, his eyes screwing shut tight.

I’m confused.  Confused, relieved, regretful with my mouth half open and my mind racing to understand why he kissed me, why I kissed back, and why he stopped.

His leg.

I check to see if blood is bursting forth like an unripened cloudberry on his trousers again, but it is only the drying, dark blot from before that stains the cloth, not a fresh rush of blood.

“Hold on, all right?” I plead, clasping his hand more tightly.  There’s a fear gripping me, making my breath come almost as fast as his, when we tore through the forest, that if he lets go, if his hand slips from mine, we’ll be caught, he’ll be dragged from me, and I’ll never see him again.  Or that he simply won’t wake in the morning.  I can’t have that.  “Don’t let go,” I whisper.

His eyes open.  They fix on mine.

“Never.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several animals are mentioned in this chapter, including the brown bear, wolves, and lynx, none of which currently exist in the wild in Scotland. The European brown bear could be found in Scotland until the 9th or 10th c. and was captured by the Romans to be used in their circuses. Wolves survived until the 18th c. The Eurasian lynx became extinct in Scotland around the year 500.
> 
> Finn shares beer with the group. Beer? Why, yes. Northern Europe was a beer culture, the Mediterranean a wine culture, and it was only Christianity that made wine more popular in northern climes. Actually, some historians argue that beer is the reason humans invented agriculture. They wanted beer all the time, so instead of having to happen upon wheat ready to harvest, they developed the tools to cultivate it and enjoy a nice beer more regularly. Smart humans.
> 
> There is an altar dedicated to the Briton goddess of beer, Dea Latis, in the Roman fort in Cumbria England along Hadrian's Wall. She may have also been associated with water and rivers.
> 
> Victoria or Dalginross in Comrie was a Roman fort and temporary camp. It was attacked by Caledonians (Picts) during the Agricola campaign, but was also in use during the Antonine era.
> 
> The Ochil Hills are a range of hills north of the Forth that are the result of volcanic activity. There are steep ravines that often make passage over the hills impossible.  
> 
> 
> Several sources, including Polybius' Histories and Caesar's Gallic Wars, depict Celtic peoples going to war completely naked. It was most certainly an intimidation technique. They are described as shrieking, shaking their hair, and defiantly unconcerned for their own safety.
> 
> How did 2nd c. Roman legionaries dress? Well, not anything particularly like we see in Gladiator, which is also set in the 2nd c. There was a major overhaul of Roman uniforms between the 1st and 2nd c., largely reflecting the colder weather Roman soldiers faced outside of the Mediterranean. We'd expect Peete to look something like this:  
> 
> 
> A cloudberry plant, which is known by several names in England and Scotland and found throughout northern forests, produces an edible fruit that looks much like a raspberry. Unripe it has a bright red appearance.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What if we were the only people left in the world?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter Rating:** T for discussion of adult concepts  
>  **Author's Note:** I have a feeling people are going to despise me at the end of this one for where I've left off. If you are looking for teasers, follow me on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com). Optional historical notes at the end.

Chapter Seven

The sun never came up today.  The sky is a dull slate grey, but I know dawn came long before Peete stirred and insisted he was well enough to move on.  I finally agreed after fetching water for my skin and urging it upon him, while I changed his bandage.  It was a late start.  Whatever lead we had on my friends, we lost it hours ago, but I feel increasingly that it doesn’t matter.  We move through swirling snow that catches in my hair and blows into my mouth, when my lips part to breathe hard from the effort I expend, helping Peete along, and it seems as if we are the only people left in the world.

And what if we were?

I wouldn’t have to worry about Peete being taken away.  Or the look of betrayal Gael will wear once they find us.  Or what I might say to mà and Primula if we go to my settlement, so that I might convince them…

To what?  Run away with us?  Primula would never last unsheltered in a storm such as this one.  She might not even last the night.

She is not with us, however.  It is just Peete and me and the snow, and the fresh blanket of white might work in our favor, obscuring the marks we leave behind, making it harder for those we’ve left behind to track us.  I try to focus on the benefits of this turn in the weather, but worries still my lips and make me silent.

It’s only Peete’s limping body pressed against mine that keeps me anchored and forces me to put one foot in front of the other, though I don’t know where my frozen feet lead until we’re right at its doorstep.  The sea has drawn us back to its shores.  Despite Peete’s injury and the cold and the cracks of thunder thrown by Taranis that split the sky, making the snow fall fast, we reach the shoreline after what feels like a long day’s journey.  I smell the salt on the air before I see the tumble of white tipped water, stirred by the storm that rages harder with every passing moment.

The gods may have had a purpose is bringing us here.  Either they mean to break us on these icy waves or they mean the sea to be our next step on the road back to my home.  I’m too tired to consider which is more likely and we need shelter, so I turn to scan the rocky landscape for cover.

It is Peete who points something out, his blue eyes latching upon a distant cove, and I see it too, following his line of sight over his extended arm: a cave with a mouth that opens towards the sea.  The tide is high, but the water only laps at the cave’s entrance, instead of rushing inside it, which would render it uninhabitable.  It would provide us with cover, keep us dry, and allow for a fire.

It’s a good spot.  Too good to be empty, perhaps, and I’m not the only one to think it.

“Does it look occupied?” Peete asks, his voice sounding rough from lack of use and lack of water both.

I let go of his arm and tug the water skin free, passing it to him.

“Can’t tell from here.”  Which is why we have no option but to pick our way over the pebble and rock strewn shore towards its open maw.

People could be taking shelter inside its depths, but animals could be making a home of it too.  With the first snow falling fast, bears will have taken to their dens for the winter.  It’s too close to the water for that, I try to tell myself, but my body is tense and ready to flee as we approach.  Even with a spear on my back and a knife at my hip, there’s little chance we could stop a brown bear not yet sunk into a winter’s sleep.

Too close to the water, I think once more, as we enter with the water wetting our feet.  I pick my way through the cave with Peete’s hand pressed against my belly.  It’s as if he means to keep me back, protect me from whatever might spring forth from the rocky outcroppings.  I’d be annoyed by the gesture—I don’t need anyone to take care of me—except I’ve been protecting him for days, so it seems wrong to mind much that he wants to return the favor.

Perhaps he thinks he could wrestle a bear to the ground, but his strength goes untested, because it becomes clear that the cave is empty with no sign of recent habitation by man or beast.  We set to work making a quick camp for ourselves.  He tries to convince me that he should be the one to retrace our steps to seek out wood drier than the soggy driftwood littering the shore for the fire we need.  It’s as ridiculous an idea as Peete wrestling a bear.  We’re lucky he got this far on his wounded leg, and I tell him as much.

“I’m not letting you go.”

I step around him, moving for the opening of the cave, and I notice that while he could stop me quite easily, he doesn’t move to grab me.  Peete’s methods for persuasion do not include physical intimidation.

“We need a fire.  We’ll both freeze if I don’t go.”

“Then let me at least come with you.”

“You’ll only slow me down, and then I’ll end up spending more time out in that storm, soaked to the skin.”  It’s not fair of me to make him feel guilty, but it works.

I promise him I’ll be back, and while I wish I had Jowanet’s ax with me, I manage well enough.  I return and we have a fire going to dry us out by the time true darkness falls.  As the fire comes to life, lighting his fair face in shifting shades of orange and yellow, I let myself breathe easier.  We’ve found temporary refuge.  We’re not found yet.  Not dead yet either.  We have a fire and I came back from my wood gathering trip with my water skin filled once more.  If only our bellies were full, all our needs would be met.

“Thank Coventina,” I say, as I pass him the skin.  It’s not a given that you can always find a bubbling spring, when you’re in need of one.

“No, thank _you_ ,” he corrects, taking a long drag from the mouth.

They’re not his gods and although they’re mine, we as a people aren’t fairing well, despite all the frenzied prayers and rituals of our leaders, so I don’t bother reprimanding him.  If the gods once listened, they stopped many moons ago.  The Roman gods are the only ones with any sway even here in our own land.  It must be why they can’t be stopped.

“Do the Romans mean to stop here or will they come further north?” I ask, nodding out towards the frothing sea.  They’re just across this water.  One of their busiest forts north of the wall lies not far from us.  It’s a port settlement, facing the same water we stare at now.

“They don’t really share their plans with me.  I’m not exactly important.”

I don’t doubt that, given what a terrible excuse for a soldier he seems to have made, but somehow he’s become important to me.  That’s why what I want to ask, what goes unspoken is, _How far would we have to run to escape them?_

Peete hands the skin over, and I tie it back at my waist.

“Are _you_ going to share your plan with me?” he asks, as he hunches his body towards the fire.

“We have to get across the water.”  With a Roman fort, the wall, and Roman soldiers along the road, we have no choice but to try to slip by them by crossing the water.

“Without a boat.”

I shrug.  “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

“Sounds like a terrible plan.”

“It isn’t much of one,” I concede.  Gael’s plan was better thought out, but I couldn’t live with it.  Mine is just built upon the premise of running and escaping.  Jowanet would laugh at my sorry excuse for a plan.

I’m good at hunting.  I’m good with a spear.  I can set a snare.  I’ve kept my family alive.  Plotting, however, is something I’ve left to others.  When Gael assured me I must act for the rebellion and the good of our people, I followed his lead.

I’m not a leader.

“If we have to cross the water, does that mean you’re trying to get back to your settlement?”  I chew my lip, avoiding his question.  I know he won’t like my answer if I give it.  Almost as much as Gael wouldn’t like it.  “I told you that wouldn’t be safe, Kat.”

Everyone around me seems to know how foolish bringing a captive Roman to our settlement would be.  But I can’t just abandon my responsibilities there and I’ve discovered I can’t abandon Peete either.

“I know, but I can get us there, both of us, and no one will know.”

I’m not sure he believes me.  His feet scuff in the sand and the dirt in the cave, and finally he murmurs, “Just so long as you get home safe.”

“Not just me,” I whisper, because none of this will have been worth it if I return to my hillfort alone.

“If something happened to you,” he begins, and I shake my head briskly, reaching for another piece of wood to add to the fire.

“We’ve skirted your Roman soldiers so far, haven’t we?” I ask with forced lightness.

I know there are a chain of forts north of the wall.  Some abandoned years ago, some still active.  How close we came to any of them after we left the group behind, I don’t know.  It was only the fact that we didn’t stumble across one of their roads that convinced me we were not within sight of a fort’s tower.

“You know,” Peete says, rubbing at the scruff of his beard, “if we did come upon them, they wouldn’t believe I was your prisoner.”

A little Votadini girl in the company of a big man, whose hands are not bound?  No, they would not.  Peete would look like a deserter, seduced by the wiles of a barbarian and what she offers between her legs.

“What do they do to deserters?”

His eyes cut over to mine, his voice sharp, when he says, “Death.”

“That’s terrible.”  My people would shame someone who ran from battle, but they’d never kill you for it.  Romans keep order through the most ruthless practices.

“So is desertion,” he says flatly.

But I know he doesn’t mean it.  I know he doesn’t want to go back.  If my inept handling of our escape brings us up against Roman soldiers, who recognize Peete for what he is, I will have to do something to protect him.  I sit, thinking up half a dozen possible solutions that lead nowhere.

Finally, it occurs to me that Peete’s realization that no one would believe him to be my captive might work in our favor if we only pretend and switch our roles.  I might look like an unlikely captor, but Peete, he looks like he could make easy work of a little thing like me.  He might not even need to bind me to make me comply.

“You could always pretend I was your prisoner.”

“That wouldn’t be much better, seeing as I’d rather not submit you to Roman justice.”

Peete might pull off such a lie, but if I was handed over to the Romans, my punishment would be swift and brutal.  The whole thing seems hopeless.

My ears pick up a cry in the distance.  One, two, and then a chorus of voices join in.  Wolves.  The bitter weather has made them howl, and I hug my arms, feeling hollowed out by the mournfulness of their cry.

I don’t know what I’m doing, and my actions could endanger more than just Peete and me.

“Come here,” he says, gesturing me close.  Peete has had longer in the cave, and he’s already more dried out than me.  The fire has no doubt done a better job of warming his bones than it has mine, as my clothing wet with snow clings to my skin.  I know from experience how warm he can feel, his body touching mine from heel to shoulder, but I refuse to move, grabbing up an unused stick to poke at the fire, sending up a shower of sparks.  “You’re shivering.”

“It’s just the wolves.”

I stare into the flames, but I can see him tilt his head.  “You think they’d bother us?”

I shake my head, no.

He holds his hand out to me.  “Humor me.”

Another shiver shakes my shoulders.  It’s cold, fear, and anticipation that makes my body quake.  This is the aloneness between us two that I feared.  We were alone last night, but conditions were not good for whatever he might have had in mind beyond an offer of shared body heat.

“I’m not like Jowanet,” I blurt out, my voice too loud for the cave, echoing and increasing my embarrassment with each fading reverberation.

I chuck the stick away from me, which unfortunately leaves me with nothing to do with my hands, but it would be ridiculous to crawl after it, when I’m the one who tossed it away.

“What is Jowanet _like_?”

Jowanet is like every other normal woman I know.  I am different from all of them.  At first I didn’t have time for running after boys in the settlement, teasing them and flirting, I had a family to keep from starving and there was little time to think of anything else.  Then when their games grew serious and stolen kisses turned to shared beds, I knew I couldn’t play along.  “I’m not going to lay with you.”

He breathes hard, a quick exhalation that sounds suspiciously like a laugh, so I glower at him for it.  I’m not sure what it is he might find funny—my refusal to lay with him or the notion that he might want me to.  Either way I don’t like it.

He roughly rubs his hands over his trouser legs twice before gripping his knees.  “Ah, well, that’s too bad.”  He frowns and the frown is more teasing than the tight smile he wore only a moment earlier.  “I do know you carry a knife, Kat.”

I wouldn’t necessarily kill him, but I’d jam my elbow into the soft underside of his chin if I thought he meant to try something I didn’t want.  Gael taught me that.  There are other soft places on a man you can target too, and I learned that all on my own.

I can protect myself from things I don’t want, but it’s the wanting or the flicker of want that betrays me.  The stutter in my chest at his smiles.  The way I can’t quite meet his eye, when he teases me.  I’ve never felt it before.  There’s something about the way he fidgets as he jokes that reminds me of the green boys at home, when they’re first drunk on Sucellus’ intoxicating brew of love.  The things he says and the way he looks when he says them are different from Finn’s empty flirtations.  If he lies, he is the most talented of liars.

Jo might take the chance that her belly will be swollen by spring, but I refuse to ever bring another hungry mouth into this world that no longer belongs to my people.  I don’t normally need a reminder of this stark reality, but as he wets his lips with his tongue, I force myself to think of my sister, when her eyes were sunk with hunger and the light in them almost snuffed out.  I won’t do that to a child.

“I didn’t expect you to,” he finally says, as he drags his restless hand through his curls.  The Roman women wear carefully arranged finger curls above their brows, but they’re dark and false unlike the natural, uneven pale curls he disturbs with his blunt fingers.  If he keeps touching them, I’ll lose the battle with myself to avoid doing the same.  “I didn’t expect that we would lie together.”

Maybe he doesn’t even remember the kiss from last night.  He wasn’t well.  He could have forgotten.  And what’s a kiss, really?  I’ve made too much of this.  He proved himself in Finn’s home, showing that he would not take what was not offered.

I nod, silently instructing myself to ignore these troubled thoughts and make good use of the heat he offers me.  I scramble to his side, and he looks only slightly startled by my change of mood before wrapping an arm around me.

“It’s cold,” I explain.

“Yes,” he agrees.  “It is.”

And I could believe that he does not mean to do anything but share his heat with me, except for how he gently strokes my upper arm, shifting me closer, pulling me into his chest.

“We could stay here,” he mumbles into the crown of my head.

“What?”

“You have a terrible plan.” I huff against him, annoyed that he’s brought this up again.  “But we could just stay here.”

“For a little while, maybe.”  Although, we’ve taken too long in making it just this far.  We need to move and soon.  Tomorrow I will need to search for some way across the water.

“No, forever,” he says, his fingertips tracing my wet hairline, smoothing back the wisps that stick to my skin.

It feels good, his slow touch.  I let my eyes slip closed.  “Here inside this cave?”

“Why not?  Maybe no one would ever find us.”

I smile at the absurdity of it, but it’s not so different from what I’ve been thinking all day.  _What if we were the only people left in the world?_

“All right.”

“You’ll allow it?”

“Yes.”

I’ve already given in to the pull of his warmth, so I might as well give him this faerie forever too.  For tonight.  I’ll spend this night in rest curled into his body.  We can pretend it will last forever.

And it feels as if it might.  I let my mind wander to a world, this place I’ve fashioned for myself, where Peete and I can live together, where the Roman Empire doesn’t reach, where food is plentiful, and my little sister weaves flowers into crowns for her yellow hair.  I wouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of lying with Peete.

It’s just a damp cave with a dying fire, but I sleep as well as I did in that snug crannog.  Until a roar, a trio of dissonant cries splits the night.  It isn’t the howl of wolves.  No beast makes a noise like this.  It is men.  Shouting in a language I do not know.  We have been discovered.

I scramble against Peete’s chest, where I have pillowed my head, his arms tightening around me, as the screams rouse him from sleep even deeper than mine, and above it all a high, plaintive scream calls my name.

 _Rowena_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taranis was a Celtic god of thunder worshiped not only in the British Isles, but also in Gaul and the Rhineland and Danube regions.
> 
> Coventina was a Romano-British goddess of wells and springs. She's a goddess Peete would likely be familiar with, for there was a dedication constructed ca. 130 to the goddess with offerings located at a Roman fort along Hadrian's Wall.
> 
> To get a lay of the land, here is a map.  
>   
> Kat and Peete are somewhat northeast from Camelon, the port fort Kat knows they can't be far from. They would have skirted Strageath and Ardoch to reach the shoreline of the Firth of Forth. These forts and watch towers, which are part of the Gask Ridge area, were all constructed prior to Hadrian's Wall, ca. 70-80. These forts were abandoned after 6 years, however, the forts of Dalginross--their original destination--Ardoch, Strageath, and Camelon were reoccupied during the Antonine period.
> 
> In addition to the fort, Camelon is known to have had marching camps, a temple, iron-smelting furnaces, and smithing hearths. It was one of the most important forts in Scotland, since it was a port and centrally located.
> 
> Ardoch (Alauna Veniconum) is one of the best preserved forts, and it also included marching camps, a tower, and a signal station.  
> 
> 
> Sucellus was Celtic fertility god, a god of agriculture, love, and alcohol. He was mostly worshiped in Gaul, but there is also an inscription dedicated to him in York. He is often depicted with a beer barrel.
> 
> Roman women during the Antonine period had finger curls at the front of their hair with the rest pulled back in coils of elaborate braids.
> 
> I'd tell you about the people screaming, but that will have to wait until next chapter...


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Those shouts are not the cries of my people or Finn’s people, but someone foreign and dangerous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was yet again written during a snowstorm, which I think is good luck for me at this point. If only winter could last forever. ;) Still posting teasers on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com) to hold you over between updates.
> 
> Thanks for all the support in various forms. Are you sure you really want to read an AU set in _Romano-Britain_? I'm beyond shocked! And tickled pink.

Chapter Eight

“Peete,” I hiss.  His eyes are wide, reflecting back my fear.  His hands grip my shoulder blades, pressing me into his chest.  He knows my language, he must know those shouts are not the cries of my people or Finn’s people, but someone foreign and dangerous.  “Rowena is out there.  I heard her.”

A harsh horn’s blast cuts through the night, raising the hairs on my neck, and I know with sinking certainty who the men are that range the shore beyond our cave.

Peete’s arms release me and he sits up, moving more swiftly than I thought possible in his weakened condition.

“Stay there,” he commands, holding up a hand to stop me, as he comes to his knees.

“What?”  I’m already looking around me for my spear.  He can’t think I’d leave her out there.

“You stay there,” he whispers again.  “I’ll go after her.”

My eyes flicker over his face.  He wants to rescue Ro?  He hasn’t even spoken to her.  She’s just some little girl to him.  Who _is_ this man?

“Stay to the back,” he urgently says, gesturing me back.

He might be made of good intentions, but alone he doesn’t stand a chance.

I don’t give him an opportunity to stop me, snatching up my spear and ducking under his arm to run towards the mouth of the cave without a word.  I don’t need to explain, because I know him well enough to know he’ll follow.  If we’re going to save Rowena, it will take both of us.  Even then I don’t like the odds.

He curses at me, as I dart out into the night.  I don’t recognize the words, but curses have a way of overcoming the boundaries of foreign tongues and the limitations of ignorant ears.  He might as well learn now that I don’t follow orders even when they’re for my own good—Gael could tell him that.

I crouch, moving close to the ground, following the sound of Rowena’s high pitched screams.  The snow has slowed, but the night is dark, making it hard to see how many men we face.  My only hope is that the dark, starless sky conceals me as much as it conceals them.  I run towards the danger, my heart in my throat, as she screams my name.  Because she shouldn’t be out here alone, and it’s my fault she’s here.  Because it could be my sister.

Peete’s footfalls are heavy behind me.  I’m not alone.  I chant it to myself as I push forward, my thighs protesting my stooped stance.  He crunches through snow and rocks, the leather of his boots slapping the ground.  He moves with less stealth but just as resolutely forward.  Until I see hulking shapes in the night, men—two of them, struggling with someone, whose scrawny legs flail, kicking out at the air.

I grip my spear tight in my hand, raising it to eye level.  I can’t see what arms belong to what body, what head sits atop what shoulders, but Ro is small and these men are huge, so I aim for the largest thrashing body and send my spear sailing.  There’s no time to hesitate, to take better aim, to pray to the gods that my spear flies true.

The spear tip finds a home in the soft neck of one of Rowena’s attackers in a spray of blood and a rain of curses.  My victim drops and my spear goes with him, out of reach and beyond my retrieval.

I’m close enough now that I can make them out more clearly: red of hair, pale faced, broad, towering giants.  Caledonians.  Different from me in appearance, habits, and tongue.  Pirates, no doubt.  They may have been driven ashore by the same storm that brought us to this shelter.  It was madness to think we could stay in that cave forever, for even a night and be safe.  No one is safe.  Ever.

I’ll need to be closer yet to kill the remaining man.  Rowena screams, and I see her plainly, as I rush forward to free her from her captor’s crushing grip.  There is only one man left, holding her aloft.  His arm wraps around her tiny waist, bending her until her back bows.  His other hand presses to her throat.  He holds something shiny.  I stumble, stopping my churning legs.  A dagger.

Ro’s eyes are wild, the whites standing out in the darkness, as her body goes completely still.  _Keep still, keep still_ , I will her to understand.  The stiller she is, the easier it will be for me.

I paw at my side for my knife.  My fingers find its bone handle and I slip it from its sheath, testing its weight behind me, where he can’t see.  I’m better with my spear.  Better with a slingshot.  Even Jowanet’s unwieldy axe would serve me well against this man.  But this knife is all I have left to save Ro.

I narrow my vision, focus on his thick arm and how it will look with my knife lodged in it up to the hilt.  If I can get him to drop Rowena, Peete and I can take him together.

The Caledonian shouts something at me, his eyes taunting and cruel, but I don’t understand his words.

“Let her go,” I growl through tightly clenched teeth, though I know my words are just as pointless as his.

His answering smile seals his fate sooner than I’d planned.  I want him dead.

The knife leaves my hand just as something hard hits me square in the back.  I see black, my head snapping with the force of the blow, but I don’t need to see to know my aim has been thrown off.  The knife will sail too high.  It will miss its mark.

My body hits the ground, knocking the air out of my lungs.  It feels like my eyes are going to pop out of their sockets, when something heavy pushes my face into the beach’s rough shore, and my shocked yelp is cut off by a mouthful of gravel.  Desperately gasping for air, I fight, trying to throw the weight off, but with each jerk, I feel propelled harder into the unforgiving rocks.  I can’t breathe.  Can’t see.  Can’t hear anything beyond my own muffled struggles.

I’m going to die.

There’s a defiant roar and I suck air, as the weight is dragged backwards off of me with a loud grunt.

I roll onto my back, choking, spitting pebbles.  Each breath I take seems like a battle more real than the fight that must be taking place.  I vaguely register splashing, the sound of heavy breathing, panting, and then a deep thwack.

_Rowena._

My whole body burns, and when I finally try to get to my knees, I fall more than once.  I crawl towards Ro.  At least I try to move towards where I think I last saw her, but I’m disoriented from my fall and stars still dance in my field of vision.  Legs charge past me, close enough to tread on my outstretched arms, but maybe I look dead, maybe that’s why no one comes to finish me off.

There are sounds that I have trouble orienting on, as I shake my head and peer up at the night sky instead of out over the shoreline like I want.  Bodies smacking into each other, thumping grunts, the sounds of struggle, and then silence.

I should keep quiet, but I can’t stop a moan from slipping from between my cracked lips, pinpointing my presence here on the beach.  I’ve exposed myself.  Yet, no one jerks my head back to cut my throat.  Maybe I’m the only one left.

Too soon I think it, as hands seize my shoulders, and I twist, trying to wrench myself free.  Something in me still wants to survive.  Fight.  I can find the soft spots on a man.  Find my knife wherever it landed.

Blue eyes look down at me.  “Kat.”

Thank the gods—Peete.  He’s alive, he’s alive, _he’s alive_.

My arms encircle his neck, clinging to him as he draws me up, and I wheeze Rowena’s name into his ear.  My legs won’t support me and he holds me hard against his body, his nose and mouth pressed against my cheek.  He’s shaking.  His whole body is wracked with tremors, and he holds me tight enough that it hurts, tight enough that I can feel his heart pounding through his chest.

I repeat her name again.  We should find her, make sure she’s all right.  She’s fast, and even though not much time has passed, it’s enough for her to have gotten far enough away that she might not hear our calls.  But, he shakes his head, refusing to answer my croaked question.

The only sound is our labored breathing and the water crashing against the shore, and I realize my trousers are soaked, as water laps as my feet.  I didn’t even notice how close to the water we were.  My mother keeps men awake all night, checking their eyes with diligence, when they’ve been struck in the head.  Their groggy presence has always been an annoyance to me, but I wonder if something similar has happened to me and that’s why I feel like I’m in a thick morning fog.

Something’s not right.  I attempt to focus my thoughts.

“Rowena,” I insist, my fingers digging into his neck.

“No, Kat.”

 _No?_   I pull back in the circle of his arms to look up at his face, reddened from exertion.  I see it there in his eyes, the truth.

I whisper it.  Say it with force.  Scream it until my throat feels like it will rend.  _No_.

I was supposed to see that she was safe.  She was supposed to go with Finn.  Annaig was supposed to teach her to make those beautiful necklaces.  Finn was supposed to teach her how to spear a fish.  It isn’t fair, and even though the gods taught me long ago that they would show me no favor, I hate them all over again for doing this to us.  I hate them for seeing to it that there is no peace in this world.  I hate them for Rowena.

Rowena was fast and no one could catch her.  No one except for a pair of Caledonians.

Peete sets me by her little body, when my fists stop their assault on his chest.  He kneels beside me as I examine the ugly red smile the man gave her under her chin, where her blood spilled out, staining her clothes and sinking into the pebbles underneath her crumpled form.  His arm drapes my shoulders as I rest my head on her chest.

No beat.  No sound.  She’s dead.  The Druids teach us that we come back.  That we know life again, but this feels as final as my da’s death did.

What kind of barbarian would do this to a defenseless child?

I sit up, my hand covering my mouth.  I peer into the darkness, trying to fix my eyes on the man who took Rowena’s life.  I’ll kill him for it.  I’ll slit his stomach, so that he has to watch his guts spill out.  I spot the man I killed, my spear sticking out of his neck, close enough to kick with my boot, but he couldn’t have done this.  He was already dead.  It has to have been the other one.

“He’s dead too,” Peete says with a jerk of his head, and I see the ruddy faced Caledonian just off to our right.  That was the one.  That was the animal who smiled at me.

“Your knife caught him in the shoulder,” Peete explains, as he pulls something free of his trousers—my bloodied knife.  He wipes both sides on the thigh of his trousers, staining them rust red and his hands shaking with each stroke.  He holds it out to me, but I shake my head, refusing to reach for it.  My eyes are fixed on the Caledonian, who wears a smile like Rowena, bright and red.  My knife throw didn’t do that.  Peete must see my confusion, because he mutters, “I’m good with a knife.”

It all must have happened while I was face down.  I owe him my life.  Again.

A fresh tremor runs through his body and out along his arms, and he pulls away from me, when my gaze skitters over him.  “Take the knife,” he insists, and this time I do, though I can barely manage to sheath it again.

“Peete, are you all right?”  My voice cracks and my lips taste of salt, as I lick the tears from them I didn’t register falling.

He scrubs his face.  “It doesn’t matter.”

I can tell that it does, but all I can manage is to keep breathing.

“You’re cut,” he says, reaching out to brush his hand over my brow, and I feel it for the first time—a sharp sting.  The rocks must have cut me, when I was face down, eating grit.

“I’m fine.”  I’m not.  “It’s nothing.”  I’m alive and Rowena is dead, and there’s nothing fair about that.  It isn’t fair that I’ve escaped with nothing but a cut.  The gods are cruel.  Caledonians are cruel.  Romans are cruel.

His thumb strokes my forehead, and I can’t meet his worried gaze, for fear my tears will turn to unchecked sobs.

“If something had happened to you…”

I shake him off.  I can’t think about that, and I can’t stomach his concern.

He sits back, his seat meeting the ground hard enough that the rocks will bruise his flesh, but maybe he doesn’t have anything left in him any more than I do.

“Caledonians?” he grunts.

“Yes.”

“What did they want?”

“I don’t know.”  Did they want her for a slave?  For something worse?

Rowena was pretty in a childish way.  Innocent.  Vulnerable.  That has an appeal for some animals.  My people fear the Caledonians as much as they do the Romans.  Sometimes more, because even the Romans haven’t been able to harness the Caledonians to their empire’s plow.  I’ve been raised on tales of their terror, and I wouldn’t put anything past them.

My eyes scout the horizon.  It gives me something to do, as we sit with the bloody tide lapping at our heels, but it’s also occurred to me that there could be more of them, waiting offshore.

There’s their boat.  It’s ours now, I think with some satisfaction.  They’ve given us a way to escape these shores, but at what cost?  There’s something else much closer bobbing in the waves.  I blink.  I was wrong: there were more than two Caledonians.  It’s another man, floating face down, his wet tunic billowing off his back.  He’s even bigger than the two men who struggled with Rowena.  This must be the man who was the weight on my back.  From the angle of his neck, he can’t be alive.

I may have killed the first, but Peete killed two more.  I thought I’d be saving Peete, but he’s saved me.  My heart thuds.  I have to make sure he escapes this alive.

“We can’t stay here.  I know we’re in no shape for it, but we need to go,” I say, weakly pointing towards the boat.

There’s no sign of a fleet of Caledonian boats, but we might not be safe for long.  It’s time to move again.

Peete acknowledges me with a nod.

I rub the back of my hand under my nose.   “We can’t leave her for animals to find.  We have to burn her.”

He gives me the same weary nod, but makes no move.

“Do you have anything metal on you?” I ask, knowing I lack anything that will be suitable.  We could pick the others bodies, but I don’t want Rowena’s tribute to be made with anything of theirs.  “I should make an offering for her.  To Nodens at least.”

I know Peete has something that would be fitting, but I ask as if I’ve never laid eyes on his brooches or his belts.  I refuse to take something from him without him giving it freely. 

I stare dumbly at her still face, as he fumbles at his breast and finally rests a silver pin on my thigh.  He has two of them to hold his cloak fast, and they are more elaborate than any piece of jewelry my family owns.  I removed them from his cloak the first night, when I draped his red legionary cloak over him to keep out the cold.  Gael took no interest in them, caring nothing for trinkets or treasure.  He only wanted to take Peete’s weapons and hear his secrets, so the pins were safe.  I pinned them back on him the next morning, when he donned his cloak once more even though I could buy grain by the sack with them.

I pick it up and examine it in the palm of my hand.  It’s circular with hashes around the outside and a bird in the middle with something its beak.

“They were my da’s.”

Peete lost his family, and I know what it is to have nothing left of someone but some small token.  I keep my dad’s fur, though it is old and patchy.  This is much finer than a ragged fur.

“I can’t take this.”

He grasps my hand in his and curls my fingers in, making them close around the pin.

“It’s not for you.  It’s for Rowena.”

“You won’t get it back.”

He huffs.  “I know how a sacrifice works.  Besides, I have another.  Take it.”

I should just thank him, but these gestures are too much.  In the endless pool of debts, I sink further and further, and it feels like I can pay him back in nothing but sorrow.

Grasping the pin tightly, I pause to smooth my hand over Rowena’s face before I find my feet.  It is only a few steps to the water, where the sea asks for its tribute.  It will have to be satisfied with this foreign silver.  It cannot have her body.

We carry her body away from the shoreline and scratch away the snow with freezing hands until there’s sufficient dry ground to sustain a flame.  There’s enough left of the fire in the cave to do the job, although the flames are slow to catch.  And I sing.  I sing her to her resting place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Romans called all the northern tribes Caledonians. In the early days of occupation, the Romans clashed with them. They won the battle of Mons Graupius (84 AD), defeating the Caledonians, but due to terrain and weather, the Romans never successfully subdued the highlands. Our knowledge of the Caledonians comes from Tacitus, who describes them as red-haired, blue eyed, and long-limbed. Tacitus depicts them as a boastful people. The Romans admired them for their ability to endure cold, hunger, and hardship. In warfare, they made an unnerving series of discordant cries and blew harsh sounding war horns. They are often associated with piracy, raiding the Romano-British coastlines, and these pirates also engaged in long distance trade.
> 
> Kat makes a ritualistic sacrifice to Nodens upon Rowena's death. Nodens was a Celtic god associated with the sea, healing, hunting, and dogs. The Romans often associated him with their war god, Mars. Nodens had a temple dedicated to him in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, which is SE of Kat's people. However, there are inscriptions dedicated to Neptune (Roman sea god) and Nodens on Hadrian's Wall, indicating that his worship extended farther north.
> 
> The Celts believed in reincarnation. They also believed in an afterlife, but not in punishment in the afterlife. Celtic Britons practiced cremation, as opposed to inhumation, although there were several southern tribes that broke with this cultural tradition. Saxon burial practices at this time varied, but it is likely that inhumation would have been more familiar to Peete than cremation. (Romans practiced _both_ cremation and inhumation during the period of the Republic and into the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, and permanent military garrisons had cemeteries for fallen soldiers.)
> 
> Here is Peete's bird pin:  
>   
> This Saxon brooch was found in Upavon along the River Avon, but similar pins have been found elsewhere. Birds were a fairly common decoration in Saxon brooches.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m done doubting him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for being so patient about this update and in the meantime, your comments, favorites, follows, and kudos have been much appreciated. Hopefully you'll like the direction this chapter takes Peete and Katell.
> 
> Feel free to follow for teasers on [tumblr](http://www.justadram.tumblr.com).
> 
> A brief set of optional notes at the end of the chapter.

Chapter Nine

It was stupid of me to insist on launching the Caledonian’s boat after our long night, when neither of us were in any condition to row or navigate and the stars were hidden by clouds, but I couldn’t stay on that beach.  Not after what happened to Rowena.

It was careless, when we can’t afford to be careless.  We could have easily drifted off course with the choppy waves and the strange fog in my head muddling my sense of direction. We could have gotten ourselves lost, rowed in circles until there was no way we could dip a paddle in the water one more time, but we see shore no later than we should and manage to drag the boat ashore, though my muscles scream from the pain of the trip and my breath comes short.

With solid ground beneath my feet, I bend over, gripping my knees, trying to fight the urge to collapse on the rocky shore, because I know how sharp and unforgiving these rocks can be.  But exhaustion and the realization that we’re alive and I might actually see home again is so overwhelming that my body weaves back and forth over my feet dangerously.

Peete catches me under my arm and pulls me upright.

“We might make it,” I gasp, looking up into his face, as I sag against him.  His lips are almost white with cold and there are ice crystals from sea spray coating his shoulders.  He looks like death: I doubt I look half as good.  “We might actually make it.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for, but we both need to rest.”

A new day might be upon us and we might be closer to home than ever before, but I have nothing left in me to continue forward any further.  I nod my assent, because that’s all I can manage, and we trudge away from the shore, dragging our feet, as we look for cover with Peete’s arm wrapped around my waist.

What we cobble together isn’t much in terms of shelter and not nearly as good as the cave we left on the far shore.  It’s nothing more than a natural outcropping of rocks no higher than Peete’s waist that we make into an almost closed ring using the hard packing snow that fell over the course of the previous day.  Some broken pine limbs we force into the ground help cage us in too, creating a windbreak that does nothing to keep out the grayish glare of the dawning sun rising over the snow.  It will do, I think, as I squeeze inside beside Peete.  With the sleep we desperately need, none of the limitations of this shelter will likely matter.

There’s barely room for the two of us.  Peete can’t stretch out his legs and I have to press into his side, so I don’t threaten our hastily constructed walls with my impossibly heavy feeling body.  He raises his arm, letting me slip underneath and tuck closer to him, and then lowers it over my shoulders, hugging me close.  I’m too tired to pretend I don’t want to turn my cheek into his chest and breathe him in—leather and salt and blood.  It’s still oddly comforting, because he’s here with me, breathing and alive, and I know I can trust him.  I’m done doubting him.

Gael thinks I’m being reckless.  In some ways I am, but I know now that I doubted Peete for longer than I needed to.  He doesn’t need to prove himself to me again.

Once we’re pressed in together, I can see that it isn’t just the broad shoulders of his red legionary cape that are crusted with ice.  His trousers are too.  If he wrestled that hulking Caledonian in the water, it’s no wonder.  He must have been soaked through, as we built Rowena’s funeral pyre, and I didn’t even register it in my dazed fog.

I stretch the fingers on my right hand, flexing them to get feeling back after handling the snow that cages us in.  When I’ve gained some control over the frozen digits of my dominant hand, I slide my hand over his thigh to the area where the crystals start.  And I rub.  I rub my hand briskly across the rough fabric, breaking off the thin layer of ice, so it won’t have the chance to melt with his body heat and leave him wet again—a dangerous prospect in this cold.

I’ve not made much progress, when he clears his throat and grabs my hand, dragging it away from his thigh and into his chest.  He holds our hands there, flattening my palm over his heart.  It’s hammering away just as fast as mine does once I realize he’s not like the unconscious men that are brought to our dwelling to be tended by my mà.  He’s awake and capable of doing for himself.  Capable of other things too.

I’ve said I wouldn’t lay with him, and then I touch him in a way I’d never think to touch Gael, in a way I have no business touching anyone.

 _Dear gods_ , his thigh was firm under my touch, hard with muscle, and it’s not the first time I’ve noticed it.  I squeeze my eyes shut.

“I appreciate the thought, but…”

I can hear his thick, dry swallow, as his voice trails off.

If there was space enough to escape from him inside of this shelter, I’d pull away and curl into myself.  But there’s nothing to do but remain pressed up against him, nothing to do but say something, _anything_ to break the awkward silence my actions have woven with expert incompetence.

I can hear Jowanet teasing me with a sultry shake of her shoulders.  _Pure_.

“You’re strong.”  The observation itself does nothing to alter the mood, so I continue, “The ice…it’s from struggling in the water with that man.”  The one with his neck broken, floating like a dead fish in the waves.  Peete’s strong enough that he killed a big Caledonian with his bare hands.

“My brothers and I used to wrestle,” he says tightly.  I feel his breath ghosting warmly over my temple, as his breathing changes.  I can see it too, fogging the air.

“You could have left.  You could have run and left Rowena and me to whatever fate the gods intended.  You could have escaped, Peete.”

“Leave you?”  His hand presses mine harder into his chest and I can feel his whole body stiffen around me.  Rowena and I would have both died without his help.  There would have been no one to go back to my mà and Primula, but Gael has always promised that if anything happened to me, he’d take care of them.  I’ve vowed much the same to him, for Gael has a home full of hungry mouths to feed too.  “You didn’t leave me to my fate.”

“That was different,” I argue.  It was different, because I owed him.  I couldn’t leave him to be sold as a slave, when I still owed him for the grain that saved my family’s life.  For the hope it gave me.  “I owed you for the grain.”

He huffs.  “The grain?  I think you can let that go.  That was years ago, and you saved me from your friend’s need to take my head as a trophy.”

“You could have gone back to join your legion.”

He lets go of my hand.  “You know I don’t want to go back there,” he says, sounding almost angry at the suggestion.

“But you’d rather not have killed those barbarians either.”  And if he’d left—just turned and run in the other direction on that beach—he wouldn’t have had to snap or slice anyone’s neck.  I saw his hands shake afterward.  I saw how taking their lives affected him.

“They were just barbarians,” he says it lightly, his tone changing, shifting smoothly, but as easily as he does it, I don’t believe his lie.

“You don’t want to hurt people.”

And I like that about him.  It might be what I like best.

“It was the only thing to do.  I’m trained to kill.  I just prefer to have some choice in who and why.”  I twist in his arms to look him in the face to see who it is that sits beside me.  I’ve never thought of Peete as a killer.  From the moment we drug him from that roadside, I thought of him as gentle, much gentler and much less of a threat than any of the rest of us.  “The Romans put a sword in my hand and marched me in enough exercises to get me from here to Rome.  And the first time I saw battle, I spent most of it trying to avoid killing anyone.  When I finally did though—kill someone—I found I couldn’t forget their faces even in my sleep.”

I’ve killed in battle.  I’ve had to.  I’ve killed alongside Jo and Gael, and I know what he means: you’re not the same after.  Spilling blood changes you, and I added to the burden Peete carries, when he chose to fight for me.

He’s strong—physically strong—and that’s what enabled him to kill those Caledonians with as much skill as Jo or Gael or Finn, but he has another kind of strength too.  It isn’t weakness that makes Peete a bad soldier.  It’s compassion.  It makes him a terrible soldier, but it makes him someone I’m willing to risk things I didn’t think I’d ever risk.

“If you made an offering, something to Belatu-Cadros, it might ease your spirit.”

He shrugs with one shoulder and I raise my thumb to my mouth, chewing on the chapped skin that threatens to crack and bleed as I worry it with my teeth.  It was stupid to suggest something so beneath him.  Even for our people, Belatu-Cadros is the war god of the lowliest amongst us, for those like me—rebels, whose homes are on the outside ring of the hillfort, the least important in our own leaders’ eyes.  Peete has a look of nobility about him that isn’t erased by mud and blood, like he was someone before his family died, which would explain his elaborate remaining cloak pin.  A man like Peete wouldn’t make offerings to any of my sorry gods, who can’t even save their own people.

He watches my nervous movements until I put my self-abused hand behind my back and scowl at him.

“Or…whichever of your gods might appreciate the gift of a warrior,” I amend.

“I don’t think that’s necessary anymore.”  His mouth quirks on one side.  “I sleep soundly with you.”

I want to snap back at him for being so presumptuous, but he might call me on my overt friendliness just a few moments earlier, when I couldn’t keep my hands off of him, so I tuck my chin and cross my arms over my chest, as if I’m cold.  And I am.  I’m not certain I’ll ever be warm again.

He brushes my brow with the calloused pads of his fingers.  A lank of hair that’s escaped from my braid shields me from his questing gaze and I bite my lip at the softness of his touch.  It’s not the touch of someone that could hurt anyone.  Killing hasn’t made Peete a killer.

“You’ve got quite a bump here under that cut.”

I fight the urge to lean into his hand.  “My head’s a little achy and I don’t know what I was thinking getting us into that boat, but I’ll recover.”

He withdraws his hand, as he says, “Well, we made it across.  That was your plan.”

I exhale noisily.  “My terrible plan.”

“Not so awful if it worked,” he says, shifting against the rocks that must make for an unpleasant backrest.   “Which it did.  But what do we do now that we’re here?”

I wasn’t entirely sure until I finally felt I could trust Peete.  “You’re going to think the rest of it is even worse.”

“Worse than what we’ve already survived?  That’s something I’d like to hear,” he teases, jostling me with his bent knee.

“We’re going to my hillfort.”

He stares at me for a moment, before shaking his head.  “ _Kat_.”

“I know,” I cut him off.  It’s the very thing he’s warned against—bringing the wrath of the Romans down on my settlement by associating the murder and capture of a legion soldier with my people.  It’s wise counsel, but I can’t heed it and still do what it is I want.  “We won’t stay long.  Just long enough to gather supplies, and then we’ll take my sister and my mà and we’ll leave.”

It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.  Even more ridiculous than it has sounded in my head, as waves lapped at the boat and I pictured myself trying to explain Peete to my mà.  Taking my mà and Primula out into the wilds isn’t safe, and there’s no real place to escape to.  The kids in the village used to talk about a place beyond the hills, almost always covered in ice, where Romans never set foot.  But nothing like that exists.  All that’s north of here are the Caledonians, and I’ve seen firsthand how welcoming they might be.

All we can do is run.  Until we’ve fallen off the edge of the world.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”  His face contorts.  “Your friends hate what I am.”

“They don’t know you.”  And because of their perfectly understandable prejudices, they don’t _want_ to know Peete.  They can’t fathom, though Peete wears Roman red, we’re all victims of the same empire.

“Maybe not, but they’re not wrong.  I hate what they’ve made me too.  I’m not my own man, Kat.  I’m owned, body and spirit.”

“That’s not true.” He does what he knows is right, instead of what his superiors demand.  He sees beyond the differences of his gods and mine, or painted faces and ones shaved clean.  Peete is more himself than anyone I’ve ever known.

“I’m a sorry weapon in their imperial arsenal.  No better than a gladiator.”

I kick at his ankle with the toe of my boot.  “Do I look like the kind of girl, who would waste her breath on a bloody Roman?”

“Well, I don’t have much competition at the moment,” he says, raising his brows at the spaces beyond our snowy shelter, to the empty world around us that is seemingly devoid of people.

But they’re out there: Votadini and Romans both.  Closer than we might think.

It would be easier to announce I was tired and close my eyes, but it’s like I have the gods themselves whispering in my ear, telling me, “Say it!  Say it!”  Urging me to take the chance.

I dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand, forcing myself to speak.  “You don’t have much competition anywhere.”

And this time I lean in.  My hand splays over his chest, steadying my upper half as I twist to find his lips.  He makes a low noise in the back of his throat that almost sounds like pain, when my lips press against his, but it’s needier sounding and makes me feel hollow and needy too like I need more of him, of this.  It makes me press harder, makes me suck at his lower lip until his arm wraps around me, an insistent pressure against my lower back, holding me fast to his chest.  Pressed against the hard planes of his chest, it still isn’t enough.  I’m still not close enough, but he must sense that, because his right hand comes up to sweep the loose hair from my face and run along the length of my jaw, tipping my head further to the side.

It’s a better angle.  It gives me access to more of his mouth, and I feel slightly off-balance, as his mouth opens over mine and his tongue traces the seam of my lips.  My fingers tighten in the fabric of his heavy tunic at his chest, at his waist, where I grip him with both hands.  I thought I’d never be warm again, but when his tongue sweeps over mine, I’m no longer cold.  It’s his lips and his tongue and his beard rubbing against my skin.  It’s the sound of our mouths meeting and his soft noises stirring something inside of me until I’m lightheaded.  Everything is warm and tingling and unfamiliar and I want more of it.  Gods, I want more.

And then with a terrifying dip, it all disappears and I see black.

I realize with embarrassment that my forehead is pressed heavily against his shoulder.  My breath comes too fast and little pinpricks of light pop in my vision, as he draws me back, whispering my name.

Did I stop breathing?

I blink back at him.  It isn’t as bad as on the beach, as I come back to him.  The world isn’t so distant.  My limbs not so deadened.  Maybe I was only gone for a moment, and that’s why I can see him clearer with every blink of my heavy lids.  His lips are rosy, the color returned to them.  From our kissing…

He tilts my head again, but I don’t get another kiss.  I’ve spoiled the moment.  Or my body has.  He squints at my forehead before pronouncing that I need to lie down.

“Your head is worse than you think.  You need to rest.”

It’s pointless to object, when my body sways as soon as he lets go of my waist.  But I insist he lies down with me.  It’s not as safe as if one of us kept watch, but even the gods must sleep sometime, so perhaps our heavenly tormentors will let us have this time to rest.  As we maneuver in the shelter for a way to ease our bones into sleep, he gives me his arm for a pillow, making me more comfortable than he must be with his knees pulled up and mine pressing into his side.

I do get another kiss, but it’s just a light one on my cheek, as I sink into unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belatu-Cadros was a Celtic deity worshiped in northern Britain. The simplicity of his altars and the offerings found at them has led historians to believe that he was a god worshiped by the lowliest members of society. The Romans equated him with Mars. Low-ranking Roman soldiers also worshiped him.
> 
> It's possible that Peete would have seen a gladiatorial contest in person. Roman amphitheaters--over 200 of them--have been found throughout the Roman empire, including in Caerleon, Wales, where Peete's legion, the Second Augustan, was based. Contests would have been held to entertain the troops.
> 
> That's little old me in the middle of the Second Legion's amphitheater in Caerleon. I'd make a terrible gladiator.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My friends showing up here is just another reminder that we can’t escape this too small world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Semester is over and I hope to get on a better updating schedule. All your comments, kudos, favorites, and messages on [tumblr](http://justadram.tumblr.com) have been much appreciated in the mean time. You all are the best!

Chapter Ten

Snow falls away from our little scrabbled together shelter, crumbling to the ground, as a leather gloved hand knocks it down.  More light streams in through the opening and the first thought I have is not for our safety, but that by the brightness of the sun, we have slept much longer than I intended.

“Morning, lovebirds,” Jowanet grins down at us, waving a hand in which she tightly grips her axe in a somewhat threatening greeting.  “Thought you could give us the slip?”

“Get that thing out of our faces,” I demand in a voice made gravely by the cold and disuse.

Jowanet sits back on her heels, her lips still curled in amusement, while Peete struggles to sit up and pull his cloak back over his shoulders.  I can hear his bones protesting, echoing signs of the awkward night we’ve spent.  I make no attempt to move, and it isn’t just morning stiffness that keeps me frozen in place.  I can’t process Jo’s presence here or the sun nearly half way across the sky.  I lift a hand to grasp my head, trying to hold it together, since it feels like it wants to split without the aid of Jo’s axe blade.

“Do you want to help us start a fire or are you going to just sit there piled up like pups?” she demands.

Us.  They’re all here, I realize, blinking up at the other two tall, silhouetted figures.

Peete’s broad shoulder grazes me as he finds his feet and comes to stand between me and the group that stares back at us.  At the brush of his body against me, I think of his frozen trousers and how he stilled my hand’s frantic movements, of how solid his muscles felt beneath my hand.

Jo’s free hand rakes through her short hair, spiked with ice.  It makes a strange noise, like iced branches clacking together in the wind.  How she came to look like a fearsome, frozen goddess is beyond me.

“What happened to you?” I grumble, swiping the back of my hand over my yawning mouth.

“What happened to _you_?” she asks with a jerk of her chin, and I remember the state I was in last night and just why my head aches like a booming thunderclap.

Another hand reaches into our collapsing shelter and I take it, though I don’t know who it belongs to until I’m pulled upright and Gael glares down at me, his displeasure spelled out as clear as the Roman script carved into the wall that now lies to the north of us once more.

“He give you this?” he asks, tilting my head back to examine the lump and bloody scrape on my head.

His whole body is as stiff as a crouched lynx.  If I said yes, he’d be on Peete in a short breath.

I wrench free of his grasp.  “Course not.  You think I’d let him hurt me?”

“Caledonians,” Peete supplies calmly, as he finishes securing his cloak with his one remaining pin.  He seemingly takes my friends’ unwanted appearance and Gael’s threatening tone in stride, although he must realize this jeopardizes our plans.

As he brushes out his tunic, I wait for Peete to touch me.  An arm around my shoulder, a hand in the small of my back.  Something.  I wait for him to place some claim on me, establishing ownership before Gael and Finn.  Finn won’t care, but I twist my body away from Gael, not wanting to see the pain I suspect I’ll see there: he will take it personally, my choosing a Roman over them.  At least that’s how he’ll see it, because for Gael it has to be us versus them in a fight that fuels his fire and gives him purpose.

But Peete’s touch never comes.  He stands, arms crossed over his chest, allowing me to choose how to respond to this challenge to our plans, allowing me my space.  I’m not alone though, because when I chance a look his way, his eyes crinkle at the corners, watching me with what looks like unmasked affection. 

“You too, eh?  Along the shoreline?” Finn asks.  “We ran into a group of those ourselves.  Big, ugly types.”

“Not every pirate can be as pretty as you,” Jo says with a purse of her lips, and I wonder if she’s over her pique at finding Finn married.

With his hands on his hips, Finn winks back at her and says, “There must be a larger raiding party trolling the waters.”

“They damn near drowned me like a sacrifice to Toutatis,” Jo complains, giving her hair another rattle.  “If I never see water again, it will be too soon,” she says, slumping to the ground.  “Still managed to kill one of them though.  Gael and Finn finished off the other two.”

It’s strange that no one has asked me to explain why I freed Peete or what we’re doing now, when they’ve obviously been chasing after us, but I play along, content enough to ignore what will no doubt cause an argument to erupt amongst us.

“Peete killed two by himself.”  We always recount the numbers of our enemies killed, and while Peete might not be proud of it, I am compelled to have the others know just how capable he is.  How dangerous if need be.

He’s not just capable, he’s on _my_ side.

I could grab his hand.  He still hasn’t moved to touch me, but I could reach out for him.  A part of me wants to and if it weren’t for Gael, I think I might just to reassure him that I’m not going to change my mind and abandon him to whatever fate the gods have in mind for him now that my friends have turned up.

But with Gael here, I can’t make myself take Peete’s hand.  I can feel Gael’s gaze hot on my neck, and I hate it—the silent accusation from the person who should know me best.

Finn slaps Peete on the back.  A lesser man might flinch, but Peete manages to stand straight and only raises a brow in response.  “I take it then that the Caledonians are the ones that bloodied you and not our Kat?”

Peete is covered in blood—his and the slain Caledonians.  The extent of it is more evident with the sun reflecting off the snow, lighting up all the dark red patches on his trousers and tunic and making his hair look like the palest gold the Romans ever mined from our land.

Finn pats him roughly on the back once more, leaning in to say, “My apologies for breaking this little moment up.  If it were up to me, you’d still be sleeping.”

I stare down at the frozen ground beneath my feet.  I slept well.  Better than I should have in that shoddy little shelter, tucked into Peete’s side on a bed of snow and rock, but now that they’ve seen us, now that Gael has seen us, I don’t want to think about Peete’s warm, solid body or his kisses that set my belly aflame.  If I do, Gael will see it in my face and he’ll think I freed Peete for the same reason he takes comfort between Jowanet’s legs or the women of our settlement.

It wasn’t that.  It can’t have been, because those things don’t matter to me.  They can’t matter, when there are bellies to feed and wars to fight and no safe place.  Last night, the kisses, that was an aberration.  It still isn’t a world safe enough for Peete and me.  One night alone in his arms hasn’t changed that.

I freed Peete because it was the right thing to do.  Rescuing him started out as a way to return a favor, repay a debt.  If it is more than that, if it could become something more than that, I’d rather Gael didn’t know.  I’d rather not have that wedge driven between us before I disappear forever.

Jo groans.  “If it were up to _me_ , we’d have a nice blazing fire going.”

I can hear the smirk in Finn’s voice, when he says, “I told these fools that Kat is the one that ran off with you, Peete, not the other way around, and that we best leave well enough alone, but some of us are stubborn.”

Peete.  He’s Peete to them now.  Or to Finn at least.

“One fool in particular,” Jo adds just as Gael spins on his heel, abandoning the campsite with great, lengthening strides.

It was one thing to be alone with Peete and think of Gael somewhere hating me for betraying them with a Roman, but with Gael here, the breach between us is more real.  It’s a physical pain in my gut like a part of me is being ripped out.  Peete may have given me the hope to survive with an armful of grain, but Gael taught me how to get on with the surviving.

I tear after him, shaking the sleepiness from my limbs, as I break into a run to catch up.  No one tries to stop me.

I shout after him, calling his name, trying to make him stop.  “Wait!”

His step falters, but he doesn’t look down at me even as I grasp his elbow and tug.  “You’re angry.”  And I’m so confused that I don’t know whether he has a right to be or not.  Gael is so like me that it’s disorienting to feel that he is in the wrong—like being lost in the fog below the hills on an early morning.

“You left us.  I didn’t know what had happened to you or whether you were safe.  Yes, I’m angry.  I’m furious.”

“I can protect myself.  You don’t have to worry about me.”

He snorts, looking over my shoulder, his grey eyes unfocused.  “Jo’s right: you’re brainless.  I’m always going to worry about you.”

“Well, stop.”  We didn’t fight alongside each other all this time for him to start thinking I can’t take care of myself now.

He rolls his eyes heavenward.  “I didn’t want to believe Finn, but you really did run away with him.”

“What did you think happened?  That he rolled me up in a bedroll and stole me away?”

“I’d been hoping we—you and me, Kat—felt the same way.”

“We don’t.”  He hates Peete, but I know him and I know his worth.  I can never summon up the kind of anger Gael reserves for Romans, when it comes to Peete.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and his voice is so low, so full of something that I don’t understand that I snap back at him, angry that I feel so differently from him and I no longer seem to know him like I know myself.

“What choice did I have?”  I shove my finger into his chest, but he doesn’t budge.  “You were going to sell him as a slave, Gael.”

He grips my wrist, holding me fast.  “You wouldn’t let me kill him.  I was running out of options.”  I shake my head at him, my mouth opening and closing.  “You do realize that’s what we’d normally do to a Roman, don’t you?  He’s a _Roman_ , Cattail.  Why can’t you remember that?” he demands, as he lets my arm drop.

“But he’s not,” I explode.

“He bloody well is,” he says, matching my fury.  "He’s wearing their red cloak.  He’s fought in their wars.  He’s killed our people.  He’s as Roman as they get.”

“If he’s Roman,” I say, pointing back towards where Peete and my friends stand beyond the trees, “why didn’t he kill me when he had the chance?  Why did he save me?  I had a Caledonian ready to smash my head in on the beach and he saved my life.  He _saved_ me.”  I breathe deeply through my nose, trying to slow my racing heart.  “And it’s not the first time.  He’s saved me before.  If he’s such a Roman, then why would he do that?”

Each panted breath Gael expels makes a little angry cloud of moisture.  “You really don’t know?”  I frown back at him, and he sighs, “I could almost feel sorry for the bastard.”

“You have to promise to stop plotting against him and planning things behind my back.  That’s not what friends do.”

“Friends,” he repeats flatly.

“You need to listen to me, believe your friend, when I tell you he saved me.”

His shoulders sag and he shakes his head, as he rubs his beard, his brows drawn heavily together.  He stops and reaches out to brush my temple with the rough pad of his thumb.  “You’re sure he didn’t do this to you?”

“ _Caledonians_ did that.  Just like the ones you were going to sell him to.  The ones he killed to protect me.”

He lets his hand fall to his side.  “That makes it harder for me to kill him.”

“Good.  I wouldn’t let you.”

I can see the muscle in his jaw work.  “Because you want to be with him?”

My chest swells with a sharp breath.  Yes.  I want to be with Peete.  Or at least I don’t want to be separated from him.

Finn said he thought I was pretending with Peete.  He said he thought it was some act to make Gael jealous.  It made no sense to me when he said it, but the way Gael looks at me now, the way his eyes burn is unfamiliar.  I draw back a step.

Whatever this is, I know that if I tell Gael our plan to escape with my family, he won’t understand.  He won’t understand why I’d want to escape with a man he insists on seeing as Roman.  Or why I’d want to escape when I could stay and fight, because Gael was born to rebel, as a child of Camulus.  What I realize now is that rebelling is something I’ve done out of necessity, because when I look at Peete, I know that what I want is peace.  I don’t want battle glory and death.  I want a world where our bellies are full, our weapons dull, and where it won’t matter that Peete wears red and I have a long, dark, Votadini braid.  If winning against the Romans means selling someone like Peete into grasping Caledonian hands, then we’re no better than the Romans and I don’t see the point anymore.

If I tell Gael our plan, he’ll try to talk sense into me, and I don’t want to hear sense and reason.  I want to live in a world where something impossible is possible for once.  My friends showing up here is just another reminder that we can’t escape this too small world.

I don’t answer him.  I wouldn’t know what to say.  Feelings aren’t to be trusted.  “We can trust him.  I trust him.”

“Let him go and let’s be done with this then.  We’ll go home and whatever lies he might spin for his superiors about his whereabouts these past days will have to do.”

Peete’s a good liar, but I don’t have enough faith in the Romans to chance it.  “That’s not an option.  They’d kill him for abandoning his post.  He’s coming back to the hillfort.”

“Kat,” he warns, but I don’t pause to listen.

I make my way back to our little shattered shelter, and although I can’t hear Gael’s careful hunter’s tread, I know he follows behind.

…

Jo sleeps flat on her back, her roll beneath her, face up to a starry sky, as I poke our fire with a twisted stick.  We’ve lost another day, but whatever Jo endured at the hands of the Caledonians, it has taken more out of her than she would like to admit.  The men agreed we’d stay put today, though no one gave voice to why that might be necessary.

Gael has gone off, spear in hand, to scout for Caledonians he worries might still be raiding the coast, although I’m not convinced he just didn’t want to get away from me or Peete or both.  And as soon as Jo started snoring, Finn got up and walked away without a word, leaving Peete and me in a weighted stillness filled only with the sounds of ice dripping and Jo’s snores.

He’s been quiet since I came back from chasing after Gael.  But then, so have I.  Quiet enough that when he breaks the silence, I jump, throwing up a shower of embers at the end of my stick.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, shifting on his seat and hugging his legs tighter with his arms.  “I just wanted to say that I’ll understand if you changed your mind.”

“I don’t often do that,” I say, jabbing the fire.

He smiles a little crookedly at me.  It’s the first genuine smile he’s given me since I returned back to the campsite, and I have to bite my bottom lip to keep from smiling stupidly back at him.  “No, you’re stubborn, aren’t you?”

He’s not close enough to kick or jab with my elbow, so I settle for narrowing my eyes at him before tossing the stick into the fire and leaning back onto my elbows.

“And what am I supposedly changing my mind about?”

He takes a glimpse of Jowanet.  She’s still snoring, but his answer is vague enough that I know he suspects she could be faking.  “Leaving.”

“With you?”  He nods.  “You didn’t think it was the best idea anyway.  Why are you concerned about it?”

He rubs at his yellow beard.  It’s as full as any Votadini man’s now and I know what it feels like against my cheek, my lips, my neck.  I swallow hard and mimic Jo’s position on the ground to blink up at the bright stars overhead.

“All your plans make me a little nervous.  But I’m attached to you.”

I let my head roll to the side to look at him.  “Like a goosegrass burr?”

“Something like that.”

I can see he wants to say more, but he’s holding back, whether because of Jo or because of me, I don’t know.

I rest my hands on my belly, lacing my fingers together, where I can feel the rise and fall of my own body, reminding me of the simple process of breathing.  With the melting snow, everything smells earthy and alive.  Like the world is refusing to give in the winter.

But it will, eventually.  Everything succumbs.

“If you’re worried about it, I haven’t changed my mind.  Just…”  I fumble for my next words, because of the guilt they churn up inside of me, making me feel as sick as if I’d eaten something rotten from being left too long in the summer heat.  “Don’t mention it to them.”

“To Gael.”

“To any of them.  They can’t know.”

“You want to just sneak off again?”

“I don’t know,” I admit, looking back up at the night sky.  “Last night wasn’t real and they came back and…”  Everything became real so quickly again that my head has been spinning ever since Jo shook that axe in our faces. “I don’t know.”

I can hear the rustle of the pine needles below Peete’s cloak, spread out underneath him, as he settles onto his back, still too far to touch with my outstretched hand.

I’d sleep better with him closer, I think, but I can’t make myself say it.

Eventually sleep comes for me and I’m not sure if I dreaming it, when he says, “It was real for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was initially thought the Eurasian lynx became extinct in the British Isles with the retreat of the ice 10,000 years ago, but carbon dating of skulls found in Scotland and North Yorkshire and have been dated between ca. 80 and 425 AD. There is even a OE word for lynx: lox.
> 
> Toutatis was a Celtic god worshiped in Gaul and Britain. According to Roman sources, victims sacrificed to Toutatis were thrust head first into a vat of liquid to be ritualistically drowned. It was once assumed by modern historians that reports of Celtic human sacrifice were so much bad press by the Romans, who thought everyone with a beard and trousers was barbaric. However, mass graves with signs of boiling on the bones may indicate that the Celts, particularly during times of distress--such as a Roman invasion--may have sacrificed humans to appease the gods.
> 
> The Romans probably conquered Britain for their mineral resources. England and Wales were rich in copper, gold, iron, lead, salt, silver, and tin, and the Romans used more advanced technology to retrieve these minerals than was available to either the native Britons or later medieval people.
> 
> Camulus was an important war god worshiped in Gaul and Britain.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep close by Peete's side, because I don’t want to end up separated from him after everything and this close to the settlement. Not when a sort of tense anticipation has coiled in my belly at the thought of introducing him to my sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this chapter is worth the wait! Thank you for all the kudos, favs, follows, and comments in the meantime.

Chapter Eleven

There are eleven children set to burn as innocents in sacrifice to Taranis. Each of them a face I know from somewhere. Most of them are our hillfort neighbors, hungry little children that daily dash across my path, when I’m heading out to hunt with Gael. Instead of voices raised in play, their tanned faces are frozen in fear and pain, their mouths stretched in silent screams. Sometimes the Druids use criminals in their sacrifices, but innocents work better to appease the gods, and times are as bad as ever, requiring greater sacrifice.

This is the sacrifice that is supposed to bring us all together in a blaze of hope, but it fills me with nothing but horror.

I blink and the scene shifts from one of sacrificial flame to a vast cooking fire, which I know in my gut is not right—creatures of what size must they intend to cook there. My eyes water against the acrid smell of smoke, blurring my first glimpse of the fresh terrors. Rubbing at my eyes to clear them, I recognize it as a Caledonian fire pit over which the same children are skewered and ready to roast like piglets, to fill the bellies of the pirates that escaped our revenge. The children’s throats are all slashed, mocking red smiles staring back at me, as I turn in frantic circles helpless to save them.

Not just neighbor children. There are more faces I know both dark and light.

Rowena with her dark hair and eyes so wide I can see the whites.

My sister. Primula.

Someone screams, high and loud, someone so panicked that they sound more dying animal than human. Someone who sounds as if they might rather be dead. And I want them to stop, I’m begging them to stop, because the sound is so painful that I don’t know how I’ll survive it, but it goes on and on until the screams fight with a deep voice in my ear, whispering my name—Katell—begging _me_ to stop.

I suck air and toss my head like I’m drowning—like Jowanet must have fought, when she was held beneath the freezing water of the bay, desperate for air—desperate to stop my own screams from tearing apart my chest. I’m not the only voice in the night. There are voices, agitated voices arguing in the dark.

Then strong arms wrap around me, pulling me into a firm grip, into a chest that smells like wool and leather and man, stilling my frenzied thrashings. I give one good jerk that does nothing to free me of the arms that hold me tight before I realize by scent and feel that it is Peete and allow myself to collapse like a heap of sun bleached bones into his embrace.

The arguing continues around me, a buzz of low, angry sounds made indistinct by my gasping, choked breaths, but I twist and tuck my face into him and cover my ears with my hands, shutting everything out, until all I know is his arms and the rise and fall of his chest. I match my breathing to his with his big hand cradling the base of my skull, and a sleep less torturous than before comes on little cat’s paws.

…

It’s a meager banquet of two dormice I found in the crook of a nearby tree hibernating for the winter that Jo watches me prepare, while the men take care of whatever morning business they have to attend to. She crouches on her haunches with a sour look on her face, as I turn the spit that reminds me painfully of the content of last night’s dreams.

“Are you waiting for an apology?” I finally ask, when she won’t give up her glaring. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“Wasn’t just me. You woke up the whole bloody world. Anyone inside the Roman Empire,” she says, pausing to spit, “and anyone outside of it heard your bellows.”

“Nightmares. The goddess Satiada herself must have sent them to me.”

As the watery, winter sun rose, my eyes opened to Peete’s face and I whispered the contents of my dreams, letting them spill out like poison from a wound, as he listened with his brow pressed to mine.

“You about gave _me_ nightmares.” Jo’s got dark bluish circles under her eyes that make me wonder whether my nightmare fueled screams weren’t the only thing keeping her up. She might be haunted by her own animated frights. “It sounded as if you took your knocks.”

“Wasn’t me that was suffering in the dream.”

She bites her lip, chewing it thoughtfully. “It’s worse watching someone close suffer. Better if there’s no one left to hurt you with.”

Jo’s family is dead, killed the same way my da and Gael’s da were killed. Gael and I still have family left, people that we worry and fret about until life’s just one long game of trying to keep them safe and fed and get revenge against those who’d hurt them. Knowing what that’s like, I see what she means by her little bit of wisdom, but I don’t losing kin doesn’t put a stop to caring. Jowanet’s kin might be dead, but there are still people left for her to worry about, people whose pain could make her shout. Every new tie is a potential new spear wound to the chest. I figure there are only so many times you can recover from the losses until you end up like my mà.

“If there are Caledonians around these parts, like Gael seems to think, or any Roman patrols, they know about us now.”

I resent the implication, even if my terror filled night did potentially expose us. It’s not something I can control and I’d happily do without my night visitations.

“We’re still alive.”

“For the moment,” she agrees halfheartedly with a one shouldered shrug. “Might have saved us when your pretty boy quieted you down. Worked like a charm, once he got his way.”

I glare right back at her at that, but she merely gives me a toothy smile, completely unaffected by my gall.

“I heard you all arguing.”

She picks up a rough stone and chucks it out of the campsite and then her eyes are back on the ground, searching for something else to toss. “There was no arguing on my part. I only told you to shut up.”

There’s the sound of movement in the underbrush, branches brushing against shins and feet on snow softened ground, the sound of one of the men coming back to camp, ready to break his fast.

I speak softer, intent on saying my peace before the rest of the group returns. “Sure you weren’t arguing over who would get the honor of slitting my traitorous throat and put an end to my bleating?”

Gael feels personally betrayed by my escape with Peete, I know. I’d like to know where I stand with Jo before we go any further together, whether we are still allies or something else.

“More like the pair of them were arguing over who would get to stroke your hair. Yellow beard won the draw.”

Jo must be up to something, speaking that way. Might be an attempt to stir up trouble. I don’t trust her words, because I can’t ever imagine Gael wanting to calm me the way Peete did. Gael has helped feed my fitful flame of anger, but he’s never cooled it.

Peete breaks through the brush and gives me a warm nod, when his eyes meet mine. He looks better than he did the day before. While Jo’s face shows signs of lack of sleep, Peete walks straighter and doesn’t have the dull look of pain in his eyes that marred the lover’s cornflower blue of them before.

I shouldn’t feel the jolt of warmth – _surprise?_ —at seeing him emerge from the brush. Of course it is him. Gael and Finn would not be so carelessly loud as to announce their approach that far in advance.

Jo gives him a little wave and doesn’t bother to lower her voice, when she says, “He looks better with the beard. Less like an overgrown boy that only counts twelve years. I can almost see why you lashed out all knees and elbows, making a fuss until he was on top of you.”

He’s probably heard her, but there’s nothing I can do about it except be glad Gael and Finn weren’t here to give witness to Jo’s teasing.

In fact, they’re not close behind, barely giving Peete enough time to sit alongside me and mumble a good morning before their bobbing heads appear, but unlike Peete’s uneven tread, I don’t hear them until I see them. Finn’s face is about as serene as Peete’s was, when he emerged out of the underbrush, but Gael looks as if nothing but blood and fire will sate him.

“A little meat in your belly will help that scowl, Gael,” Jo calls out to him, and I can’t help but smirk.

“A very little,” he says with a jerk of his head at our food.

“You’re free to find something better,” I grumble, my smile disappearing, as I disassemble the spit and pull my knife from my side to divvy up the meager portions.

“Romans think dormice an indulgence,” Peete offers cheerfully. He must know full well that this pronouncement will only make Gael more irritable about his morning meal. “They raise them by the dozens to eat between their regular meals,” he continues blithely, as Finn and Gael arrange themselves around the fire. Who has enough food to eat between a meal? “We’re dining well by their measure.”

Gael grunts, cutting off whatever other culinary details Peete might have intended on sharing with us. “It’ll do until we’re back home.”

Jo’s head snaps up at Gael’s pronouncement and Finn’s copper brows crawl up his forehead, as he turns slowly to face Gael with his hands on his hips.

“Home?” Jo demands a little loudly, holding out an outstretched hand for a morsel of overcooked meat.

“Yes. The settlement.” He taps his foot with barely contained impatience. “Isn’t that right, Cattail?”

The group’s astonished attention swings on me as quickly as it fixed on Gael a moment earlier.

“That’s right,” I say calmly, holding out a piece of meat to Finn.

“With our Roman friend?” Jo asks, already swallowing her small portion.

Friend. She thinks it a mockery to call him that. I throw the term she uses to mock my innocence back in her face. “With my friend, yes. Why, did you want to voice an opinion about it?”

No one speaks. Even Peete, who I assured last night of my continued intention to take him to my hillfort and leave with my family, looks too shocked to say a word, although his silence might be born of possessing the smarts enough to know when best to be quiet. Surely he hasn’t gotten along in the Roman army on brawn alone after all.

It’s Finn who finally says something vague enough not to raise my ire but put an end to our steely three way staring contest. “Well, sounds awfully cozy.”

With his arms crossed over his chest, Gael looks as if he has another opinion of the arrangement, but he doesn’t share it. We’re at a standoff. I didn’t tell Gael the rest of my plan and I have no intention of telling Finn or Jo either. It is my secret to keep, although Gael’s grey eyed stare feels strained by dread like he suspects I’m lying by omission, knowing me as well as he knows himself. My refusal to be totally honest has widened the gap between us, and I’m not sure we’ll ever be where we once were. Especially with not much time to repair the breach. I’d take him with us—Gael and his family both—and put things back to rights between us if he wouldn’t be so angry at me for wanting Peete to come along.

“If that’s the plan,” Finn says, as he licks his fingers clean, “I’ll see you all home and then we’ll part ways, since I best be home myself. To Annaig.”

His last words seem meant for me alone, since his green eyes settle on me and hold my gaze while he pulls his index finger from his mouth slowly enough to be considered flirtatious if I didn’t know better. Finn might think me as stupid as Gael does, but at least he understands the stupidity, the folly of being unable to leave someone behind.

…

We make good progress with Peete and me taking up the rear. I keep close by his side, because I don’t want to end up separated from him after everything and this close to the settlement. Not when a sort of tense anticipation has coiled in my belly at the thought of introducing him to my sister. Primula is the only person I know who would sit for hours in a meadow, picking through scrubby growth to find the tiniest pink flowers for a posy, except for Peete, I suspect, who won’t stop commenting on the effect the changing weather is having on the colors of the world around us. It all just looks increasingly grey to me and less likely to give us food.

My mà is like to be less pleased than Primula by the handsome, broadly framed Roman I’ll be bringing home, but if she means to lecture me about men, it’s a mite too late for that, when I might have started my own home by now all without her notice. Getting her to leave, however, will no doubt be less difficult to manage: she’s not Votadini and has no ties to the place with my da dead. I think it might hurt her far less to say goodbye forever to our hillfort than it will me. She might even welcome the thought of never catching sight of it again.

I tell Peete in hushed tones about what we might expect, how things might be, when we get to my settlement, while we walk along, close enough to each other that his red cloak brushes at my right calf, and he watches me spin my suppositions with a smile that is a shade shy, as if meeting my family isn’t just important to me but means something to him as well.

Reaching out for my hand, his fingers curl around mine, stopping my fidgeting and stopping our forward progress. My eyes flick towards the others, who pick their way more silently than us, aided by the thinning underbrush as we approach the road that leads to our settlement. My gaze is drawn back by his struggle to knot his cloak around his neck.

My brows knit together, baffled by the necessity of this readjustment, until he holds out his last remaining cloak pin in the worn palm of his hand. He takes the pin between his fingers and reaches for my dark fur, fumbling to slip one hand beneath it to pull it slightly away from my body.

“I want you to wear this,” he explains, pinning the beautiful ornament through the skin of my fur, his knuckles lightly brushing and bumping my collar bone until he pulls away to admire his efforts.

I look down too. I’ve never had anything this beautiful, never been given such a treasure. I shouldn’t take it, shouldn’t accept something that belonged to his da, but I want it. I like the look of it there against the sleekness of the fur.

“Thank you, I…” I struggle to find the proper words, fiddling with my braid, pulling it over my shoulder and twisting the leather tether between my fingers, overwhelmed by the feeling of warmth filling my chest again under the glow of that smile and the long tangle of his pale lashes. It’s not the heat from the night I kissed him, but the warmth I experienced upon seeing him this morning and the warmth of knowing it is his arms that cage me tight, making me feel safe.

He catches me off guard with a touch to my cheek. His fingers trace my cheek bone, moving slow enough over my skin to raise bumps on my arms, until they slide over the ridge of my ear to tuck a wayward lock away.

It can’t be his intention to tidy my appearance, because his hand slides into my hair, loosening the braid itself, his fingers wending between the strands and spreading against my scalp. His thumb presses along my jaw to tip my head back, making my mouth fall open as his lips descend on mine. It’s just a gentle press of his lips against my chapped ones, a hint of what I know him to taste like, what I know a kiss between us two can feel like. Two small kisses, nothing more than a tease, but my heart flutters like the wings of a moth drawn to a candle flame by the time he presses his third and last unhurried kiss to the corner of my mouth, while he smoothes my hair back with his hand.

The others, quickly leaving us behind, have not seen. If Gael had seen this exchange, this kiss, would he guess that the hillfort is not our final destination? Would he guess at my ultimate betrayal? And for what am I betraying my oldest friend? A fantasy? I squeeze my eyes tight, trying to hold fast to the warmth and forget the twisting pain thoughts of Gael bring on.

“Hey,” Peete says softly, his hands coming to rest firmly on my shoulders. I force myself to open my eyes to look up at him. “Kat. It’s all right,” he assures me, but there are things he can’t fix.

“When we leave,” I murmur, licking my barely kissed lips nervously, “we’ll never be safe.” The feeling of safety with Peete is a false one, in that while I might be safe enough with him—he will never hurt me— _we_ will never be safe. “We’ll always have to run.”

There’s a flash of disappointment that creases his brow, but it melts away like yesterday’s snow, leaving his face deceptively unlined. “You don’t have to do this for me. Even if running into a hapless Roman is the best thing that’s happened to you,” he teases.

I twist my boot in the ground, digging into the soft earth. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“I may have thought that part,” he admits with a little upturn of his lips. I stare at them for a half beat, wanting them on me again, my body and mind at war. “But I’m a man grown. As long as you’re home safe, I’ll be fine. No need for you to risk yourself any further.”

He’s misunderstood my hesitancy.

I shake my head. “No, I’m doing it for all of us. Escape will be better.” I say it firmly, trying to convince us both. His thumbs brush the fur wrapped around my shoulders, and I exhale. “I just…in the wilds, it will be hard enough to keep my family alive. I can’t complicate it any further.” No babes. Not ever. No matter how much his kisses set my heart to pounding.

I hope he understands my inexpert words, because I don’t want a repeat of my embarrassment in the cave, when I vowed that I had no intention of sharing his bedroll for anything but warmth.

“It’ll be just like your friend Finn said, you, your sister, your mà, and a shaggy haired Roman sitting around a fire. Very cozy.” I’m about to ask him if he minds this little scene that lacks for any of the comfort Jo and Gael take in each other, when he rocks me towards him with a tightened grip on my shoulders and whispers, “Doesn’t matter, Kat. I just want you.”

Something darts off to my right. I grip his elbows, keeping him still and slowly turn my head to see what it might be that is here in the brush with us now that we have been almost entirely left behind by the rest of the group.

There’s another quick flash of movement. Red and white in a blur between two bramble thickets.

A deer.

It must have been hidden in the thickest part of the growth, as the others walked by, and after they were gone been emboldened by our lack of movement.

It is a mistake I intend to capitalize on.

I let go of his elbow, holding up one finger to my lips and then turning my palm flat , instructing him wordlessly to stay where he is. I crouch, balancing my weight over the balls of my feet, as I move forward as noiselessly as possible. The deer moves quickly, frightened by the realization that we are not just strange looking forest creatures that mean it no harm, but it has to move through the brush or head for the road and if I move fast too, I have a chance to bring something back to the hillfort. Something I can share with Gael and his family. Something in the way of an apology.

I’m slowly losing ground to the deer and must take my chance soon before it is out of my throwing range. My hand reaches up and back to grasp my spear, tied to my back, and pull it free as I jump over a fallen log and begin to dash in earnest, pushing through the burn in my chest, towards the deer before it reaches the road and makes it into the high, dry grass on the other side. I pump my arms and suck air through my teeth, dodging obstacles. I bring the spear above my shoulder. Close, so close, as it darts around a rock. I have no time to slow my steps or steady my arm, as I pull the spear back.

_Miles!_

I trip, falling to my hands and knees, jarring my teeth together, at the sound of a booming shout that make my head twist back.

_Miles! Miles!_

The shouts come from behind me, but though the voice is deep, it is not Peete who shouts in the Roman tongue, and then another one, just as loud, joins the clamor. Maybe two more or even three.

_Siste! Nunc siste!_

I scramble to my feet, my boots slipping in the muck. With my feet underneath me, I spin back around, leaving my spear, broken by my fall, behind and foregoing quiet for pure speed, as I rush back towards Peete. Urgency makes me careless and a branch I fail to duck hits me in the face, drawing a thin slash of blood, but I push forward, my hands outstretched as I dive straight through a bramble, making as much noise as Peete ever does, as I crash through the brush.

I shouldn’t have left him.

I pause, momentarily disoriented, and scream his name. It gives away my position to whoever might be shouting after him, but I need Peete to call back to help me find him. I can’t go home without him.

There is nothing in return, even the shouts of what must be other Romans have stopped, so I run again. This time towards the road, where I might better see what is happening, with my feet pounding hard over the ground.

I’m not yet to the road when I go to scream his name again _—Peete!—_ but my voice is cut off with a sharp smack of a hand over my mouth and a tight arm around my waist, pulling me up painfully short and taking my legs right out from under me, as the attacker hauls me against his chest. I bite the hand that covers my mouth, making my captor curse, and I kick my legs as hard as I can, attempting to throw whoever it is off balance, but I’m already being dragged backward, away from Peete.

“It’s Romans,” my assailant hisses. “Hush,” and my churning mind finally recognizes the voice, the accent as belonging to Finn.

I kick harder, trying to make contact with his shins or something more sensitive. I land one solid blow and his hand slips from my mouth.

“Let me go,” I beg.

“It’s no good. There’s too many of them. They’ve got him already.”

I beg, a broken string of pleases, as tears begin to course down my cheeks. He’s big, too strong to fight, as he tows me away.

 _Peete_.

“Kat, I’m sorry.”

Whatever I might say in response is lost. He recovers his grip on my mouth, sealing off any bargains I might make to secure my impossible future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Criminals and children were occasionally sacrificed by the Celts to Taranis by being burned in wooden frames, according to Roman sources such as Lucan, Cicero, Caesar, and Suetonius. Mass graves back up these claims.
> 
> Satiada was a goddess worshiped in Northumbria. Little is known about her although her name may mean, goddess of grief.
> 
> Cornflowers grew in England amidst grain fields. Folklore states young men in love wear them and if the flower fades quickly, the love is not returned.
> 
> And yes, the Romans raised dormice domestically and ate them as snacks. They're still considered a delicacy in Slovenia.
> 
>  _Miles_ is Latin for soldier. _Siste_ is a command: stop! _Nunc siste_ : stop now!


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I spend my hours in hiding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been... how long? Inspiration left me, but it has returned. I wrote half this chapter last night after putting the baby to bed and then woke up at 6 AM to finish it. I am determined to complete this fic. I've always loved it and want to see it through, and if there is anyone left to read it, I'm sorry it's taken me this long.
> 
> As always, optional historical notes at the end.

Chapter Twelve

The winter is cold and hard and the harvest my people brought in is not enough to see us quite through. Everyone’s belly could use more in it, we all look as hollowed out and haunted as I feel. Now is the time that my hunting should prove crucial to the survival of my family, but I’m not the help I might otherwise be to my mà and Primula. Gael feeds them, when I fail. He steps in and takes care of them. I can count on him for that.

Mà says nothing about the change in me. Primula tries in her gentle way to draw me out, but I won’t speak to anyone of Peete. The pain is too sharp and I fear their disapproval. I wanted them to meet him, know him, see him for what he was. I can't put what Peete was into words. I can't do him justice.

When we returned, Gael did the talking. He told the people in our settlement about the Roman, and it was decided in council that it would be safer for me to keep out of sight for now, so no Roman happens upon me and recognizes me, endangering the rest of our people. The implication is clear: Peete will betray me.

Of course they would think that. Just as my friends thought he was not worth saving, when the Romans swarmed him and dragged him away from me to a horrible fate that I see sketched against my eyelids both waking and asleep.

The council needn’t insist I stay close to home, because I have no interest in wandering anymore. I spend my hours inside our house, huddled on the pallet I share with my sister, my head hung between my knees and my arms wrapped around my head. Sometimes I rock to forget the world around me. Sleep rarely comes. When it does, the goddess Satiada torments me, sending terror filled dream after terror filled dream. Romans burning my settlement. Romans holding a sword to Peete’s pale throat. Peete’s body blue and bloated.

The screams that strangle me disturb more than my slumber. My mà and sister suffer alongside me, until my sister makes a compound that tastes of dirt and herbs at my mà’s instruction. I swallow it down at night, while they watch with matching pursed mouths. Their compound doesn’t stop the terrors. It traps me in them, silently struggling. There is only one thing that would help. I miss the fleeting safety of Peete’s arms, wrapped around me as sleep overcame waking, keeping the nightmares at bay, but his arms are very far away.

So I spend my hours in hiding. The daylight hours present a challenge, since people visit my family for their healing skills. There is a tree I single out, hidden far enough away to me safe from prying eyes. I sit underneath its bare branches with my back to the settlement with my knees pulled up to my chest and the cool of Peete’s cloak pin pressed to my lips in a kiss I can’t give the giver, hoping no one will be insistent enough to find me.

I hate their questioning looks. I hate their worried stares. I am deaf to their complaints that I’m of no help to my family or to them. Once they decide I’m less of a liability and seek out my skills again, I will still refuse to help them. I am a vengeful little monster. My friends refused to help me save Peete there by the road, when I knew he was still alive. In turn, I will refuse them my aid.

Peete might be dead. If I find that the Romans have executed Peete as a deserter, I pray to the gods that I die too. It will be easier than knowing I failed him.

I am my mà’s daughter after all.

I am eventually betrayed, but not by Peete. It shouldn’t surprise me that it is Gael, who spies me in my hiding spot, for he is a tracker of exceptional skill. The best my settlement boasts. He probably knew where I was all along, only waiting for the moment when in my weakness, eyes sunk in bruises, he might approach.

At first I won’t acknowledge him, though he moves to join me beneath my tree, his back sliding down the bark until his rump meets the ground in a crunch of old snow. With his shoulder buttressed against mine, I can feel the rise and fall of his chest. Our bodies fall into an odd symmetry, breathing at the same pace. It wears me down and loosens my mouth. I have been so alone since returning home. It would be easier if it was like before, when I knew what I was and how little the world had to offer me. Then it was just me and Gael. Romans were our enemies, and the world was brutal but it made sense.

“Is this all about that Roman, Cattail?”

I wrap my arms more tightly around myself and shift just enough that we no longer touch, breaking the rhythm of our bodies. “Why do you care?”

“Why do I care?” he repeats back, scrubbing his face. “Everyone but you sees it, Kat.”

I’m no good at reading people, but some things are as plain as the nose on your face. “You’re afraid he’s singing like a songbird, telling those Romans all our secrets, putting every last one of us in danger.”

His eyes cut to mine and half his mouth quirks in a sad kind of smile. “That too.”

I don’t know what else bothers Gael, but I don’t have the energy to prize it out of him.

“He would never do that,” I insist, the last of the day’s strength sharpening my words to spear points. If Peete’s alive, he will guard the secret of the people who took him captive, which is more than any of us would do if we were in his position. He is better than us all. Better than I deserve.

“Your faith in him is misplaced.”

“Is it?” I ask, whipping my head to the side. “No one has come for us yet.”

“Yet. He is a Roman and will be true to them in the end.”

There’s the gleam in his eye, the glint of hatred that Gael nurtures like a flame in his chest, keeping him warm through the waxing and waning of the winter moons. I share his anger, but unfortunately, it does nothing to ensure Peete’s safety. Doesn’t do much to improve the likelihood the rest of us will survive either, despite his certainty that Peete is the one who places us in danger. There have been uprisings before led by men like Gael, and they have broken against the Roman legionary’s shield.

“Why do you feel the need to keep reminding me of that?” I ask, my hand going to the pin, which I’ve put at my breast, tucked amongst the furs wrapped around my shoulders.

“Because you proved you're too damn thick headed to understand me after just the once. He wasn’t like us. He wore their red cloak. He fought for them. Raised his sword against our people.”

“You don’t know him.” Peete is as Roman as my mà, and if their yellow haired people fare better than ours, it is only by a degree: we’re all victims of the thorny, creeping climber of the Roman Empire.

“Like you do? What did he do to win you over?”

“He risked everything for me.”

Gael nods. “That's what it takes, huh?” He looks around, his hand beating a rhythm against his long thigh. “Your people are starving, and if we survive this winter, your people will be preparing for war.”

Gael would like that. He shouts in council, urging war against the Romans. Hungry bellies will listen, hoping there will be food in victory. He might finally get his way, and if he does, he’ll want me at his side. As soon as I could fight, as soon as he taught me, I was always by his side. I was his and he was mine in all ways but one, and that should still be true, but I won’t be dragged out into the hedgerows unless I can be certain Peete is safe. He didn’t want to be a Roman soldier, and I won’t go to war against him.

“People will die, Cattail, while you sit here scowling over a Roman. I'm worried about you and I'm not the only one.”

“He has a name: Peete.” Just saying Peete’s name fills me with a bubbling stew of emotions like fear, guilt, and a sadness so sour it turns my stomach. There’s longing too. Although admitting it now will do no good. “You just don’t want to say it.”

“By the looks of that glare, you don’t either.” He scuffs his foot in the frozen ground, grinding dead, yellowed grass under his boot. “Which is it: guilt or loss?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He sits forward, crossing his arms over his knees. “Do you feel guilty that he was caught or do you spend your days hiding because you feel his loss?”

“Can’t it be both?”

He rests his forehead against his forearms. “I hoped,” he starts, his words muffled by his skins and furs, “that maybe it was a game you were playing. That the way you acted with him was a way to make me jealous. But it’s real for you, isn’t it? Whatever it is you feel?”

I don’t know how to respond. I know I feel his loss like a missing limb, and that’s all wrong, because while Peete saved me time and again, I still don’t know him the way I know Gael. We didn’t grow together in the settlement, me running on skinny, banged up legs, trying to keep up. This thing forged between us is new and raw and I have nothing to compare it to.

Gael lifts his head and fixes me with a stare. “I’ll be honest. I’d rather it was guilt.”

I’m still working through how I might have made Gael jealous or why I would ever want to, when he leans to the side and kisses me. My lips are parted as if in invitation, but there’s no response on my end. All I can do is register the sensation of his chapped lips, the heat of his breath against my face, and the roughness of his palm as it spans my jaw.

He pulls back, a frown drawing his brows together and his mouth down. “I had to do that. Just once.”

And then he’s on his feet and trudging away with his head tucked down against the winter wind, leaving me completely alone in a world turned on its edge.

The bastard takes more than a kiss. He steals my secrecy too. _Traitor_. The next time I seek the refuge of my lonely tree, I’m found faster than my nose has a chance to ache from the cold.

I have no use for the Druids. I don’t like their methods and I don’t like how they keep themselves apart, safe from fighting and the paying of taxes, and supported by the people who believe fervently in them, despite our endless losses. I really don’t like Hamish, but he’s the only Druid I know, so it’s personal, watching him stumble around the settlement, drunk on the sacred drink, while the rest of us do our best to scratch out an existence.

He doesn’t sit beside me the way Gael did, when he found me here, and if he did, I’d crack him in the nose with my elbow for disturbing me. Instead, he hovers over me, his arms crossed over his chest, his face flushed with the cold or mead, staring down with contempt lining his weathered features. His paunch hangs over his belt, proof that he's better fed than the rest of us and made soft from drink. There are some who say he was a handsome man and strong, when he was chosen to count as one of the Druids. I can’t picture it. Even the dark hair that curls over the circlet they bestowed upon him when he was picked holds no appeal for me.

“What do you want, Hamish?”

“For you to stop acting deranged, sweet child,” he says, tapping his boot against the toe of mine. “So I might convince the council you’re to be trusted again.”

I jut my chin out, petulance straightening my spine. “I thought it was Peete they didn’t trust?”

“If that’s what you want to believe,” he says, widening his stance, looking somewhat unsteady on his feet. It's the drink. It's always the drink with him. “Peete. Is that the name of your Roman?”

“My Roman?” I ask with narrowed eyes, wary of anyone who comes looking for information about Peete. If he keeps our secrets, I can keep his.

“Isn’t he yours?”

I shrug. He acted like he wanted to be mine, and an act like that could have kept him alive, could have saved him from my knife if I had a soft heart. But it felt real. It feels real now, when I contemplate his death.

“Your people could benefit from your skill at the hunt. This is no healing grove,” he says, pointing up at the leafless tree I sit beneath. “Lounging here, you’re wasting everyone’s time, including yours.”

“All I have is time, Hamish.”

He nods slowly, knowingly. “Is that right?”

“Must be no different for you. Our people could use your skill at malign magic.” Call down magic on the Romans, wither them away to naught but ashes, so we can take back what is ours and feed our people. “But then, you’re useless, aren’t you? A fake. A phony.”

For letting venom spill from my lips, for directing it against a Druid, I could be cast out. Hamish could demand it and no one would be able to argue against his word, but my folly doesn’t stir any fear in my chest. I can summon no regret. It’s all one continuous ache that nothing will soothe and no fire can ignite into the rage Gael wants me to feel. I am still water. Unsuitable to drink. Good for nothing.

“Yes,” he agrees with a grimace. “I can do nothing to turn them back.”

“You might have tried. Sending children to burn,” I say, turning my head to spit on the ground. My voice rises with a strength I shouldn’t possess after more than a day without food. “While you pretend to have visions unleashed by the concoctions you brew.”

I squint up at him, outlined against the wintery sky, thin light illuminating his unimpressive figure. What does he feel, when innocents cry to the heavens?

“Don’t sneer at my concoctions. They could do you some good. I'll brew you a forgetting drink. Make you forget your Roman.”

“Is that a threat,” I say, pushing to my feet, hands clenching at my side.

“That a girl,” he says with a twist of his lips. “More like an offering. Forgetfulness can be very useful for those of us who have things we’d rather forget.”

I wonder what he wants erased from his mind. The Druids are always so sure of themselves. Even when things go wrong, they shoulder no blame. “I don’t want to forget.”

“Then you best start acting like he is yours. Stop denying it. Play the little lover. That they’ll come to understand. They might even cheer for it: the Votadini girl who won the Roman. The way your da took your mà.”

His gaze falls on my pin and I control the urge to cover it with a trembling hand. “What does it matter if they understand?”

“You’ll need allies if you want to get him back alive.”

I swallow. No one has spoken of getting Peete back, and I don’t understand why Hamish would be the first. Why would he want him here? Peete is a soldier, one of them. That’s what Gael wants to hammer into my thick skull after all. Us and them. It’s so clear to Gael.

Hamish digs in his furs and produces a skin, holding it out to me with his brows raised in what looks like a challenge.

I raise my chin. “What’s that?”

“Mead.”

If it’s from his stores, it’s not meant for me. The sacred drink is only for warriors and the Druids that brew it. I am no warrior. Just a scrappy little rebel, sneaking around the edges of roads, stealing what I can.

My eyes dart from the skin to his gray eyes, undimmed by his drunkenness. looking for proof of lies. “Not a forgetting drink?”

“You stupid? I told you it’s mead. Or don’t you want it?”

I grab it from his hands and unstop the top, bringing it to my lips. It’s sweet on the tongue and I take three long pulls, while he shakes his head at me.

“There’s rebellion in the air, sweet child.”

Swallowing, I sniff at the air, letting mead dribble off my chin.

He cocks one brow, unimpressed by my display. “Your people will want you to fight.”

He reaches for the skin, but I pull it back out of his reach. It’s mine now. He won’t wrestle me for it: he can brew more. There’s always more for them, for all the good it does them. But I need this skin. Its fermented contents won’t remove Peete from my memory the way Hamish’s concoction might, but it might dull the pain for one evening.

“They have their warriors,” I say, as he tucks his big hands—big enough to be a warrior’s—back into his scraggly black furs.

“But they’ll need you.”

“You sound like Gael.”

“There are a lot of voices now that rise in chorus with your friend Gael. Time for you to remember who the real enemy is.”

This feels like Gael’s time. With the frightful winter upon us, he might become the leader he looks as if he was born to be, tall and straight, dark and threatening, handsome according to the tattle of the girls both young and old. I don’t know what the gods intend, and I refuse to believe Hamish knows any better than I. This rebellion might only rise long enough to allow the Roman scythe to mow us all down. No one knows for sure. Anyone who promises something different is a liar.

I take another draw at the skin, feeling the warmth spread through my empty belly and a muzziness less unpleasant than a blow to the head creep up the base of my skull. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “So what is this little visit about? Peete or an ill-advised war?”

“Both, because I have a feeling you’ll be no good to us without the Roman.” He’s right. I won’t be. Maybe Hamish does see some things true. “And a rebellion needs all types,” he says, sizing me up. “Even a small, charmless slug like you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Katell's settlement is roughly near modern day Motherwell, Scotland.
> 
> We know very little about the Druids, but some historians believe they brewed various drinks, including the forgetfulness drink Hamish offers Katell. In their society, they were set above all others, including the warriors, and anyone that went against them would be cast out. New archaeological evidence supports that in addition to leading rituals in sacred groves or at sacred wells, they also practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. They may have looked like other members of their society or they may have been crowned in some way or wore a headdress.  
> 
> 
> Europeans didn't use the scythe until the early medieval period, but ancient Romans used it long before that.


End file.
